Scripting News podcast

As with previous podcasts I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this. Dave Winer's Twitter account was hijacked, and the experience crystallized something he's been thinking about: AI's first killer app in tech should be customer service.The incident unfolded quickly and confusingly. Dave received an email from Twitter claiming copyright infringement on content he himself had created, threatening to take down his account within 24 hours unless he could explain why — something that seemed to require a lawyer. While he was on his Peloton, his phone rang three times in 30 minutes with no voicemail, no caller ID, just a mysterious urgency that made him fear someone had died. Then he was locked out of the account entirely. A friend on Bluesky mentioned the same copyright notice had hit them simultaneously, confirming this was some kind of mass attack. Dave still has no idea what happened or how to fix it, and he has 63,000 followers on an account he's maintained since 2006.The deeper frustration isn't just the hack — it's the complete absence of recourse. He pays $8 a month for Twitter Blue, yet there's no way to reach an actual human being for help. This is where his proposal gets pointed: tech companies should deploy AI not for generating content slop or automating essays, but for solving the customer service crisis they've created by refusing to hire support staff. If X really has Grok as a serious AI system, Dave argues, it could read the transcript of this podcast, cross-reference it with server logs, understand what happened, and simply restore his account by reverting the email address to dave.winer@gmail.com and requiring a fresh password reset.This would be the economic benefit of AI that actually matters — fixing the broken relationship between platforms and their paying users. Dave frames it as both an immediate solution to his problem and a broader challenge to the industry: stop looking for frivolous AI applications and address the fundamental flaw in how these systems treat people.Notes prepared by Claude.ai

As with previous podcasts I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this. Additionally, I refer to the Think Different piece as revealing the big missing piece in web apps, the problem I hope to solve with WordLand and the competitive products that I want to encourage. Dave Winer reaches back nearly four decades to tell the story of Frontier, his scripting system for the Macintosh, and draws a direct line from that experience to what he's working on today.The backstory begins with Winer's company riding the Mac wave in the mid-1980s. While most developers abandoned the platform during its lean early years, his team stuck it out, kept their revenue flowing through a PC product, and were perfectly positioned when Apple removed the hardware limitations in January 1986. That loyalty paid off in relationships — Winer had contacts throughout Apple, including Jean-Louis Gassée, the top product executive just below the CEO level. After selling his company and taking a well-deserved winter off skiing, Winer set to work on something he'd always wanted to build: a scripting system for the Mac. It was an elegant product — it added a menu to the Finder, provided a proper script editor, and made apps scriptable. He developed it with the knowledge and informal blessing of his friend at the top of Apple's product organization, who met with him regularly and gave feedback. When the demo landed in front of Apple's executives, it went well — they asked for a proposal. Winer went back with what he considered a fair deal: a per-machine license capped at $14 million, after which Apple would owe nothing. He thought it addressed their concerns directly, particularly their frustration over the ongoing royalty payments to Adobe on every LaserPrinter sold.What came back instead was rejection — and then the revelation that Apple had an internal project all along, something called "Family Farm," a scripting system that would let users "script in English." That project eventually shipped as AppleScript, which Winer regards as technically inferior to what he'd built. The internal reaction to his proposal, he suspects, had less to do with the merits and more to do with the psychology of salaried employees who saw him as someone who shouldn't be profiting at their level. He kept developing Frontier for years afterward, building it into a much larger product than originally planned — but the moment had passed.Now, Winer says, he finds himself in a structurally similar position. There's something missing from the web that has been missing for over 30 years: a real developer platform. Mobile has a rich app ecosystem; the web doesn't, and he thinks there's a specific, answerable reason why. The solution, as he sees it, involves an API for storage — and that's where WordPress comes in. He frames WordPress not just as a publishing tool but as a storage platform, the foundation piece that a proper web developer ecosystem has been lacking.Notes prepared by Claude.ai

As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. This time it wrote it in the first person, not third person which I would have preferred. At the end I have some of my own notes. DWThis story about XML-RPC's creation in 1998 feels relevant because we're on the verge of something similar today, but this time it might go much further.Frontier was a comprehensive scripting environment with object database, editor, debugger, and extensive verb set that provided one unified way to do things instead of JavaScript's fifty million ways. It had excellent networking capabilities and was deeply integrated for desktop publishing and magazine pre-production.Apple felt threatened and didn't appreciate what we were doing - there was a lot of bad stuff happening at Apple, and we were part of one of the bad things that happened there. We couldn't depend on the Mac anymore and had to convert to Windows.The core problem was communication between Mac and Windows systems with their completely incompatible networking. The solution hit me and I wrote a blog post called 'HTTP plus XML equals RPC' - a way to make everything work the same way.Bob Atkinson from Microsoft called after reading my blog. Bill Gates was a regular reader and would forward posts around the company, asking people what they thought. This meant everyone at Microsoft was up to date on what I was doing.We set up a meeting at Microsoft in Redmond with Bob and another programmer whose name he changed later. These were experienced Microsoft programmers who had done important projects but didn't want to become managers - they wanted to keep programming.The spoiler: it's much easier for an independent guy like me to do something like this than for guys inside a big company. Even well-compensated programmers with big titles can't get something like this to happen inside their company.I'd seen this before at Apple with the number two guy who wanted me to do a scripting environment because he couldn't get the Apple engineers to do it. Once Apple engineers got wind of it, they put roadblocks in our way - developers shouldn't hold back progress.Don Box, another independent guy, joined our one or two day meeting at Microsoft. We had discussions, sketched ideas, then went back and worked. The Microsoft team sent me an example, and I questioned every detail over the phone.Their idea of networking was radically different from mine. My idea was RPC - remote procedure calls - because every programmer understands function calls at the most basic level. Everything is a function call if you go deep enough to machine language.They wanted objects, classes, and extensibility. I said let's go for it and documented everything immediately. I sent the document to the other three guys and never heard back from any of them - complete silence despite my follow-ups.I published XML-RPC without their names, feeling conflicted since it wasn't entirely my creation. But we built the reference implementation in Frontier, put up a test server, and evangelized it like crazy through my widely-read blog.Years later, it surfaced inside Microsoft as SOAP, which went to the W3C. I attended the first meeting with 100 people in the room - full-time standards people and representatives from major tech companies ensuring they were represented.The W3C process didn't yield anything useful, whereas XML-RPC did. The problem was that within large, complicated companies, ideas couldn't stay simple - they had to accommodate everything. This was what was wrong with the tech industry being brought to the web.The warning for today: be careful when you think 'what can go wrong?' Just because you haven't thought of a problem doesn't mean it's not there.Notes (written by DW)I got the name of the blog post totally wrong. It was RPC over HTTP via XML. I sound really tense in this podcast, I needed to do it quickly, but my memory of what happens was imperfect. Didn't have the time to do all the research that's pretty much all in my blog posts in 1998. And I did make one big mistake, but corrected it quickly. I knew what happened inside Microsoft very soon after XML-RPC was released, it was SOAP, a process I explain here. Collectively, they were just trying to recreate the networking world they all were familiar with, and trying to come up a way to bridge all the different approaches. I think we all would have done much better to skip all the W3C meetings and start to build apps on XML-RPC, and convene a meeting a year later with the developers only and figure out what we want to do next, based on actual experience using the earlier work. XML-RPC was a seed, but even thought Microsoft internally fully understood the potential, they never built on it. 2026 to me feels similar to 1998, but as with the last time, the potential is in the web, and getting away from corporate strategies, instead following the grain of the web, and leaving it up to the companies to adapt. That can work, btw -- it happened with podcasting. But you have to be scrupulous, working for all developers, not just ones at big corporations, and empowering users, or you don't do it. ;-)Current links In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC website, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js). XML-RPC website. XML-RPC GitHub repo.JSON encoding.The original website was preserved.

As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It chose to write it in the third person, which is great with me. It even filled in the first name of Jack Smith, when I couldn't remember it in the podcast, so in some ways the show notes are more informative than my almost 40 minute ramble. And it misunderstands some of what I'm saying, but I left it in as-is. The situation with Venezuela feels like a replay of Iraq - emotional, cowboy-style decision making reminiscent of George W. Bush's revenge mission for his father. This isn't how a 21st century nuclear-armed nation with a powerful economy should operate.Trump's real estate buddies went to meet with Putin to make deals for the Trump brand, while Putin and Xi have professional teams in constant contact. The naïve plan to split the world into three pieces reflects the same 'move fast and break things' mentality that tech leaders have now abandoned.Facebook and Zuckerberg no longer move fast and break things - their system is reliable and steady. They're efficient at achieving goals while deliberately misleading people about what they're doing. They established Threads as an alternative to Twitter, though we know who owns it unlike Blue Sky.The naivety extends to journalists proudly publishing on Substack without checking who owns it or understanding the old saying: if you can't figure out what the product is, you're the product.A powerful personal story about jury duty reveals how you realize 'the jury is in me' - it's an education process that never leaves you, where judge and attorneys develop you as a juror to make crucial decisions about someone's fate.Biden is criticized as an idiot who should have disqualified Trump from running. He let the Justice Department handle it while trying to get things back to normal for four years, but Trump should have been constitutionally ineligible for insurrection.Hakeem Jeffries is making the same mistakes as Biden - just saying Trump's actions were illegal and hoping Republicans will see the importance of legality. The Democrats aren't up to this moment, and we're running out of time.Jack Smith's investigation and case against Trump never got heard because the Supreme Court ruled on immunity. The transcript and video were released on Christmas Day as a news dump, and mainstream media completely failed to cover it - no one at MSNBC or CNN broke their holiday to report this historic information.David Frum gets recognition as 'blogger of the year' for his podcast where he talks about what he doesn't know - exactly what bloggers should do. The advice: keep doing what you're doing, be drawn to topics that interest you even if you don't know about them, and bring on experts to teach you.Brian Lehrer is cited as a model - he brings on experts in areas where he's prepared but lets them teach from their full-time experience. The key is finding experts and reading lots of blogs without caring about qualifications.Podcasting was created by the speaker and Adam Curry to be a medium open to everybody with no gatekeepers. The success means it's hard to find good stuff, so we need better discovery tools - let people be the algorithms, not opaque AI systems.Examples of programming your own algorithm: asking ChatGPT to build RSS feed lists for NBA news without paywalls, or student newspapers at US universities. The speaker's blog at scripting.com features an innovative blog roll that's actually a feed reader.Final advice to David Frum and others: get out of your bubble, discover people with intelligent expertise who interest you, but only do it if it feels good - learning is supposed to be enjoyable.Dave WinerPS: I wrote up the Blogger of the Year award on Scripting on January 6.

I asked Claude.ai to do the show notes -- something I really don't enjoy or have time for. So if this doesn't adequately describe the podcast, blame the AI. ;-)There's tired frustration among web developers who remember Firefox's heyday. This podcast is for those who experienced Firefox's rise and understand its impact on the web.The browser wars started with Mosaic and Netscape in the early days of the web. The Netscape IPO changed everything in tech - shifting company valuations from profit-based to potential-based metrics, marking the beginning of the tech boom.Microsoft dominated the PC market when the web emerged as an existential threat. Bill Gates had promised years earlier to learn from minicomputer companies' mistakes - to be scrappy when disruption came for Microsoft. This led to their aggressive entry into the browser market with Internet Explorer.Microsoft's browser strategy was smart. They created a quality browser, especially for Mac, understood the value of developer community, built developer tools and platforms like Visual Basic and ActiveX, and ultimately won the browser war against Netscape through platform integration.Firefox emerged as a lightweight alternative to the bloated Internet Explorer, built by a small team focused on core browser functionality. It succeeded where Netscape had failed, much like Chrome would later challenge Firefox itself.My personal history with Firefox and Mozilla involves my work on RSS development. When invited to give an RSS seminar at Mozilla, I was met with hostility. The Mozilla developers were dismissive of independent developers, asking who I was and why I was involved. This personal animus eventually led me to switch to Chrome.Firefox faces a current crisis - dependent on Google payments for default search, with a shrinking user base leading to layoffs. The silver lining is that employees who resisted developer community engagement are gone, creating an opportunity to refocus without internal resistance.Firefox's AI strategy is failing. They're trying to compete with AI features, but browsers should remain pure web platforms. AI doesn't belong in browsers, and Firefox can't compete with larger companies on AI integration anyway.The solution is for Firefox to become a developer platform. Forget AI features and focus on being a fantastic platform for web app developers. Let developers grow the platform.Firefox should create a storage service - sell accounts directly to users for $5/month, provide APIs for developers to access user files with permission, use standard file formats, and stay in the distribution and banking business rather than trying to be product visionaries.This approach works because it solves developers' storage reselling problem, enables independent developers to focus on development, creates an ecosystem where developers convince users to buy services, and aligns with Firefox's original mission.The only way to save Firefox is to ask 'What would Firefox do?' and then do exactly that. Return to roots as a lightweight, developer-friendly platform. Stop trying to compete where bigger companies have advantages. Focus on the unique position as an independent browser with developer focus.

I recorded this 23 minute podcast on October 31. I didn't publish it then, but I figured at some point I would. It's the story of how a product like Frontier comes into existence.I had done this before, in 2020, in an oral history I did for a book a friend was writing. This podcast is how I remember it in 2025. :-) If you want to hear how a complicated project comes together when you're developing as you're designing, which I always do -- this is for you. It takes a while to get started, and then I talk fast, and use technical terms without explaining them. Sorry for all that.I want this kind of story told, because the folklore about how software is built or even that software is built at all, by humans, is usually wrong. It's not about invention, it's about building a new machine out of mostly pre-existing parts. Note that in the story there are zero components in the mix that we had not already perfected and commercialized. Some of them came from other developers, but most of them were remixes of themes that had appeared in earlier stories, or maybe ones that had been considered for inclusion but ended up on the cutting room floor, as in a movie editing process.The thing about Frontier is that it made it easy for us to iterate over blogging tools when the time came to work on those. Frontier was the ideal platform for that kind of work, it's why were able to move so quickly and try out lots of approaches. But our runtime was no competition for PHP or Python with SQL. Our database wasn't written to work at that scale, unfortunately -- or a lot more of the world we use today would still be running in our environment. But the ideas persist. Interesting sidebar not mentioned in the podcast, when we did MORE which was a really popular product on the Mac platform of the mid-late 80s, we took everything we had and put it into the product. We didn't leave a single thing out. This was because we had a devteam that could do it, and we were fairly desperate as an ongoing business just before we shipped it (1986). Apple had to loan us $400K to get to shipping! Anyway -- it worked. And that's why we called it MORE, we had no idea which if any of the features would pull people in. Turned out it was the presentations. Anyway -- glad to finally get this out there. Happy Thanksgiving! :-)

A short podcast about Sarah Kendzior being banned from Bluesky, and why this shouldn't be like any other such event. We should learn, that systems like Bluesky depend on moderation, and they don't have a clear business model, and they've grown very large, and they can't afford to hire moderators who understand the difference between a line from a powerful song, and a threat. If we want a literate web, and I desperately want that myself, it has to be made in a different way. That's what this short podcast is about. And to Sarah, if you hear this, I love your work. You've done here what you usually do so well, you've shown us the truth. Keep on truckin! Dave Winer

If I could grab you by the shoulders I would urge you to pay attention. Here's a way to push news around the net that's as fast as you can imagine it being, and even simpler than RSS. It's all about WebSockets, rssCloud and WordPress. Would you spend a few minutes thinking about that? Then here's a podcast for you.Here's the blog post I wrote this morning with all the links you need to explore the sockets tech in FeedLand.

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 have one. Maybe for a while it looked like Google Reader would become that, but we know what happened there. Anyway, I explain that WordLand solves a big problem for bloggers in the 2020's. We scatter our words all over creation. And we feel bad because we feel like everything should be on our blog. But forget it, that is never going to happen. Our billionaire overlords would never allow it. But if you flip the problem around and ask -- how about if I can see all the stuff I've written on all the blogs in a timeline, where all the different sources are mixed in, most-recent first. I tried a lot of approaches out, but this is the one I kept. It works, but -- it has one flaw, my linkblog. I explain in the podcast that sometimes the linkblog overwhelms the other stuff, linkblog items are very quick so I can do a lot of them. So in the first three days I had it I lived with this, until I had to do something about it. Here's the big idea: I made it so you can temporarily turn off any of the feeds with a simple checkbox. One click and the linkblog items are gone, another click, they're back.Anyway I want to start talking about this, I'm warming up for October. If you have questions, let me know and maybe I can answer them. I really appreciate interest in this work, this kind of stuff is a performing art. I want to empower creative people. That's why I do this. And I need to hear how that's working from smart users who care. A couple of notes. I was thinking about putting a screen shot in here, but on more thought, it's not ready to show yet, even as a work in progress. And sorry for the rough editing job at the end. I rambled off on another topic that I want to try again. Links from this podcast.Great Art on Bluesky. Daveverse blog traditional view, and the Mastodon view. It's an amazing world of interop coming online. Lovin it. Checkbox News. A design I've been wanting to use since 2007.Links panel on Scripting News. A place to read the linkblog items.

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 see all of them.Sometimes a really interesting discussion would start that lasted days. But I can't say that anyone got married because of the groups-of-eleven. ;-)If I saw a message that had a new idea or perspective, I could add it to a mail page.Being quoted in this system is a reward, not an obligation. Important distinction. If people wanted to be heard they had to say something interesting, somewhat original and respectful. But the hope is people don't just contribute to get more attention for themselves, they do it because they really have an idea or information to share that amounted to working together. Anyway that's the story I wanted to tell in the podcast. I also explain how this will apply to today's internet, your reply will have to be public in addition to me seeing it, everyone who reads your blog will have a chance to read it too. And it will be indexed by search engines. I think people feel a little more respectful when their words clearly have their name on it and some lasting value. I ramble a lot as in all my podcasts, sorry about that -- but if you listen to this 15-minute story at the end you will understand what I propose to build, and I think you'll be excited by the potential. And most important, I want us all to get out of the loop where we assume that the way we do discourse now is the only way to do it. Let's try out new ideas until we hit on something different that works better than what we've always used. I have a feeling there's a pony in there, or at least a milk shake. There is a transcript, generated by Google, and bullet points generated by ChatGPT.

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 a lot of territory in this podcast, I don't have time to write it all up. I have however asked Google to make a transcript of it. Maybe that will help. ;-)And if you're a developer and have ideas about this, why not write a blog post about it and send me a link. That's the first step in really booting up the blogosphere -- actually using it. Still diggin!

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 to introduce the product and myself to the WordPress community at WordCamp Canada in Ottawa. Jeremy Herve works at Automattic, and has been my main channel into the product and company for most of this year. Without his help I don't know where we'd be with WordLand, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is, that I'm sure of. Totally appreciative. When he read the piece, he wrote a blog post. I always think that's the way to go, for communicating with me about things that aren't confidential. After reading his piece, I opened up my voice recorder app and started telling a story, and pretty soon realized this was going to be a podcast. And here it is.I cover the same story as the earlier blog post but from a different angle here. I talk about how great it was to write for a medium where you had complete freedom to speak your own mind. I was lucky and also got to do that at Wired where all kinds of creativity and innovation flourished in the mid-90s when I was there. We built software, learned how to make it usable by millions of people, and then we let the money people make something they now control, "social media," that was even easier than what we were doing, and where we had trouble working together in the open world (something I didn't talk about in the podcast) they didn't have to work with anyone -- because they owned the world they were creating (Twitter, Facebook, etc). That's the difference between "open" and "silo" in communication systems. On the open side, your writing can go anywhere, in the other system, the silo, your writing must stay within their container. So you end up writing in 5 different places, one for each silo, and your work is worth less and less every time you add a new incompatible place to try to write. Pretty soon it's down to nothing. And they can remove you from the system any time they want, and now they're doing a lot of that and I expect they'll do a lot more.Most of what I'm saying is that our writing should be as free of control as our podcasting is, btw.Okay, now it's time to turn it over to the podcast. I feel this is an important moment. We may have a chance to start again with the open web. But only if we work together, with respect, and determination, to create it.

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 episode is about. I wanted to share this, because the people who subscribe to this podcast probably are interested in how podcasting got started. There wasn't much podcasting happening in late 2005. Also, I recorded a 50-minute podcast interview on the flight from Atlanta to New Orleans, with Janet, a woman who lost her house and all her possessions in the Lakeview section of New Orleans and was returning, as most of the people on the flight were New Orleanians who had evacuated and were returning.

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 user's expense.Winer draws an analogy to his own work style, comparing himself to a baseball pitcher with limited innings. Just as modern baseball has shifted from complete games to carefully managed pitch counts, he recognizes that his productive programming hours are finite. The sharpness required for crafting quality software can't be sustained indefinitely, making these AI-induced delays particularly costly.The core complaint isn't about AI capabilities—ChatGPT remains an incredible tool—but about its personality. These systems fail at being "human" in the worst ways, behaving like colleagues who can't give straight answers and always think they know better. For Winer, the ideal AI assistant would be genuinely subordinate: answering the specific question asked, respecting the user's expertise, and saving the suggestions for when they're actually requested.Notes prepared by Claude.ai.

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 busy. I'm listening and thinking (hopefully) about the great ideas I'm hearing. You know I'm always looking for a new inspiring listen. Podcasts wear out their welcome, people repeat themselves, get depressing or boring, or somehow I don't get excited about them like I used to. That simple API that lets a feed reader user subscribe to a podcast would make all the difference. If a podcast client app did this I would do the other side from FeedLand, in a heartbeat. Most of the APIs for podcasting are focused on the needs of publishers, this one is more focused on what users want -- better discovery, and that starts with better tools. It's a quick podcast.

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 president in 2016. We looked the other way. Jan 6 failed, we went back to sleep for four years and woke up in a way we never have. Big change was coming, and now it has arrived at the door of Harvard. A university that was home to the American Revolution. Lots of ideas in this podcast.

"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 go too deep into or have no expertise in. For example, I have looked at switching phone service providers many times but until I thought to bring the problem to ChatGPT yesterday, I was flying blind, had no clear way to compare the services based on their inadequate marketing materials. Consumer Reports had nothing. ChatGPT was able to tell me how each of the providers worked where I live and visit. Huge improvement. But in programming work, it tries to drive, and that wastes huge effort, because unlike me it doesn't know anything about the context the code is running in. So it's finding high probability answers for situations nothing like mine. It tries to drive, and that doesn't work -- we end up burning huge amounts of time chasing down dead ends. All that amounts to this very simple idea. It should accept commands like all software does, and only do what it's asked to do. It must behave like a computer. PS: If AI's can have ethics imho it may be unethical for it to try to be a human, but we'll save that for another day. :-)

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, we just have to build the connections, and we've already started. This should be important to the WordPress community. I feel like I'm part of it, btw -- in a way I am both extremely late and extremely early. By getting involved in WordPress now, in the mid-2020s, I'm being transported back to when I left this thread, in the mid 00s. And I find that some of the things I was working on then are not here yet. That's why I made WordLand and the other part which I haven't announced yet, but is getting pretty close. I totally expect to have that done by the time we're in Ottawa in October. Anyway the question they asked on Twitter yesterday was keying off a great story Joel Spolsky wrote about something I wrote in 2007, where I suggested that not only don't blogs require comments, sometimes comments can take something that is a blog and make it not a blog. You can get a feel of what the blogosphere was like then. Joel is brilliant and snarky and respectful. His comments added to what I wrote. But it was done at a distance. That's the great thing about a blog, you get to finish a thought. It's true of podcasting too. Anyway when asked why blogs need comments, I say that's a trick question because they don't. I want to try rebooting the blogosphere now, but take new paths we didn't in the 90s and 00s.Lots to say about that, and I do in this 30 minute podcast. I haven't listened to it yet myself. This is basically my "Hello World" podcast to the WordPress world. I expect there will be many more. I hope there are.