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 networks I've been on starting in the mid-70s. The list is very long. And each of them had their own limits, rules and features, and each led to a certain kinds of relationships between the participants. Mail lists that gain traction always flame out. It's hard to get people to read your blog. If you make it easier it changes into something else. Instagram, Youtube, TikTok form hierarchies of influencers. I think of those as the networks Taylor Lorenz covers.

But there isn't a structure that I'm aware of that leads to people working together. It's a puzzle I keep trying to figure out.

We need working together to survive climate change and fascism. It would be good to crack this nut.

One of the nicest things about ChatGPT is that it's always up for working with you. The critics of AI don't begin to understand this. As an example, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to draw a picture of people working together. Here it is. I didn't have to wait. It didn't look at my follower count, or my bank statement to decide if it was willing to work with me. I pay the $20 a month, and I've got a persistent always-on collaborator.

What got me thinking this way this morning is a bit of collaboration I did with palafo (a human) on Threads. It's remarkable. We actually did some work together. No sarcasm. It may be hard to read the thread but if you're curious about collaborative systems, here's a real example. Serendipitous, unplanned, but we figured something out by combining our experiences. Fantastic.

Later, Ben Werdmuller, a person who I've gotten to know recently, is intelligent and asks good questions. He asked one today, how do they get the live audience on SNL to laugh when they want them to laugh. I had an idea and shared it. (This was discussed on Reddit. I also checked with ChatGPT.)

If you take away one thing from this post it's that we can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans. In fact, in a way they are facilitating the collaboration. If you want to be part of the collective human intelligence, you may be thinking about the machines the wrong way. Maybe they're the most human thing we have, because AI is made up of humans, somewhat like Soylent Green. ??

PS: I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of humans working together to clean up a mess.

PPS: Yesterday I gave John O'Nolan what I think is a good idea for getting his Ghost blogs federating with Threads, Mastodon et al. I didn't expect thanks or even a response, but I wonder if he even heard it. Most of the time, trying to help other people results in not even an acknowledgment that they saw it. If I were him I'd look for a painless, quick way to get maximum interop. Something like ghost.social. I'd give the same advice to Matt at Automattic (in fact I think I did).

PPPS: I think acknowledgment is a key part of working together on the web. Nothing more than "I wanted you to know I saw it" is often all that's needed to grease the skids of discourse. I've had a friendly disagreement with Manton at micro.blog about this.

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 one of the feeds has a new post, it goes to the top of the list.
• You can expand a feed to see the five most recent items. Click on the pubdate to go to the full item on the web.
• It supports keyboard navigation. Up and down arrows move through the list, Return to expand/collapse.
• We're working on WordPress plugin.

Four head-level attributes in your blog.opml file. Only one required.

• blogrollUsername -- required
• blogrollServer -- optional, if not specified it's feedland.com
• blogrollCategory -- optional
• blogrollTitle -- optional, but you really should provide a title, otherwise we invent a silly one for you. ??

Screen shot of how the head-level attributes are set on Bull Mancuso's blog.

Screen shot of the blog itself with the blogroll.

A link to Bull's blogroll category on feedland.com.

A place to ask questions offer kudos, etc. ??

PS: I'm not trying to sell you on using Drummer to run a blog. Rather I needed a place to figure out how this works, so we know how to set up and document the WordPress plugin.

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.

100% built on WordPress. Why reinvent all the good stuff that's been debugged and scaled and has all that support in the world. As I like to say, one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.

PS: A seven-minute podcast that explains. ??

PPS: And don't forget about the blogroll. It's part of the puzzle too.

PPPS: The house was really cold when I did this recording so I walked around to try to stay warm. By the end I was pretty close to shivering out loud. I turned the heat up after I finished.

The question we intend to answer.

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 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.

Really impresses people. ??

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 other side of the hill. And one exit south on 280 was Xerox PARC, and where NeXT had its startup offices.

My 1988 driver's license.

This was the place where I started development of what became Frontier. I always wanted to do a great system level scripting thing, based on what I learned from Unix and what I loved about the graphic user interface.

It became a lot bigger than I anticipated. In the beginning it was meant to be a replacement for the Macintosh Finder, with an outliner for a file system browser, and of course a fantastic scripting ability, of the OS and of scriptable apps. I wish Apple had supported this effort but I didn't understand at the time that they couldn't. They weren't set up to let anyone but Bill and Andy make great products, even if their products weren't all that great, imho of course. You have to live with the mythology you create.

A lot of people got their first programming experience with Hypercard. I would have loved if more of them get their first experience with Frontier. Even better would have been if our products worked together, but that wasn't in the cards either.

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 2021, 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 it and have had it available all the time I've driven a Tesla.

They say you should always be fully attentive when using FSD. I am always soooo ready to take over for it. I don't trust it. And I also don't feel that when I'm in white-knuckle mode when it's driving, that my reflexes are anywhere near as good as the reflexes I have when I'm driving, with fifty years of experience, and maybe a few hours of experience supervising a FSD car. I don't have a sense of how to work with it. So I err on the side of turning it off whenever I feel like even slightly scared.

I also don't like roller coasters, but if I did, I'd recognize that this is different. A roller coaster is designed to give the exact same experience to every user every time. It's designed to give the impression that your life is about to end, using gravity and eyesight and all that evolution trained you to be scared of. It fools you into being scared, when you're actually safe. Every so often you read about someone dying on a rollercoaster. That probably improves the fun for thrill-seekers, and gives people like me justification for staying away. People also bungee jump knowing there's a chance the chord could break, but they know it's not going to.

None of that is true for the Tesla. It's making it up as it goes along. And it definitely encounters situations it can't handle, or it misinterprets a set of obvious facts, or even worse it hallucinates just like ChatGPT.

Yesterday, I was driving from Lake Katrine to Woodstock with FSD, and it was doing really well, up to a point. First I was on Route 28, a four-lane road, for about five miles, it turned onto 375 which is a curvy two-lane road. I was starting to feel slightly comfortable. Then we come up to 212, where 375 ends. A busy intersection. Traffic coming from the left and right, and many are turning onto the road I'm on. I watched in awe as FSD tried to find a way to make a left turn in this complicated situation, starting, stopping, it tried, found itself out in traffic, and got stuck there. I had enough and took over. Luckily the car waiting behind us had left a little room. I've dealt with this intersection probably a few hundred times in the last few years. I know the crazy things the other drivers do here, and I know to watch out for them. The Tesla didn't know.

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 it, who I don't know. I hope they're not Nazis. I don't see how someone who could design such a thing as a Tesla Model Y, in 2021, the year I bought mine, could be anything like that.

This car is going to be copied. There will be a generation of cars that comes along, some that have not arrived yet, that will have to stand up to a comparison to a Tesla. This is the original.

To be alive when such a product comes out and not own one, that would be hard for me to do. I don't think my "support" of Tesla could mean that much. The money is already spent. It costs nothing to maintain the car (one of its innovations).

It's like the Macintosh of cars. I would have owned a Macintosh in 1984 even if I wasn't one of Apple's top developers. I also know that Steve Jobs didn't design the machine, he stole it from people at Xerox who did. Apple refined the idea, made it practical, like a Tesla, commercial. That's a huge accomplishment, commercializing and humanizing a concept like the Mac was harder than inventing, imho. I have a feeling that Tesla must stand on the shoulders of giants in a similar way.

Tesla is always sending me emails, which I usually read, but last week I got one urging me to join X. I thought what bullshit. I don't want these products connected. There was a time, not that long ago, that I would have thought a car hooked up to Twitter as a fantastic and futuristic idea, but now, I think it means no one of principle, certainly no one who is a target of Nazis could work at Tesla in the future. And those are some of the brightest people out there.

Meanwhile I'm looking at other company's EVs with lust. I might like a Kia or a BMW. If you're making a consumer product, Nazi branding is not a good look. And X is becoming a stinker too.

PS: I was inspired to write this piece by one written by Ben Wurdmuller posted yesterday. I've had much the same feeling about FSD. This piece started out to be about FSD, but the preamble, like the one in his piece, got so long I decided to post it first as its own piece.

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

Gritty monochrome photograph.

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 get away from the chaos. It wasn't until the work was over that I was able to start to get back into my flow.

In my work, I start pretty much at the same time every day, and I get a good five or six hours before it's time to do the next thing. The first hour is warming up. Then I go to the notes I left the night before about where I'm going next. By hour two, I'm not quite at my highest rate but getting there, by hours 3-5 I get monster stuff done, if I'm in a good groove. Hour six is iffy. All the while I'm taking short breaks to check email, tweets, whatever. All of it asynchronous. Waiting for my attention to be available, for a short period.

After 5-6 hours of this, I'm wiped out.

I can handle small interruptions, like a package delivery.

But if it involves the front of my brain for any real amount of time, if I have to shift my attention elsewhere, boom, it all drops out of my head. It doesn't take much of a shift in attention to lose the whole thing, and basically have to start over the next day.

Try to imagine a professional tennis player. Do they talk about anything other than tennis during the game. Not with any focus. I'm sure of it. Their attention is fully on the sport. Same deal with intellectual achievement. If you're doing something that few other people do well, you're not only doing the complex things, and require multiple steps and a lot of detail, and memory, but you're sometimes inventing things that no one has done before. All the levels interact and affect each other. And you're doing a shitload of learning the whole time. Until you're burned out for the day that is. Or your deck gets shuffled. ;-)

PS: People sending you emails saying how great your last thing was, they don't interfere at all. ;-)

PPS: I wrote this post during one of my breaks. I won't edit it until the evening, when I do lite work that doesn't require much focus for any duration.

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 user's standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn't like RSS btw.
• It has been pointed out that some level of spying happens based on IP address, and I can testify to that, I get podcasts with ads for a local supermarket, kind of spooky but I guess ok. I can't recall ever receiving spam as a result of subscribing to a feed, and I never get messages from them when I unsub begging me to come back. So it isn't a huge problem in a real way at least for me, yet.
• I block spammers. In twitter-like systems, like Mastodon, spam means you attached a post to my post that is in no way responsive to it. You're just trying to coast on the flow generated by other posts. I don't abide that. Have a nice day.

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 you try to reorganize a complicated bit of code, and you find yourself scratching your head about how this or that works, that's a sign that it doesn't work.

But it's much more fun to add new features to a broken foundation than it is to either fix the foundation or rip it out and put in a new one.

One thing Twitter is good for — getting support from your cable ISP. Spectrum’s other ways of providing support are designed to get you to give up without using too much of their employees' time. On Twitter, they pretty much always stay with it to resolution. And on Twitter, they have real people who have access to network tools, so they can see the problem from their end, and can give you a clue of what if anything you can do to fix it.

I'm pretty good at bug reports, and that appears to work with the online support people they have on Twitter. If you try to chat with them or call them on the phone they read from a script which has you completely tear down and rebuild your system before they'll consider thinking about the data you have. And all this after keeping you on hold listening to their insidious advertising for 15 or more minutes.

I don't think the other twitter-like systems have any critical mass with support people from ISPs. Not like Twitter.

BTW, support is one place ChatGPT would excel, btw. All kinds. And I don't think too many people will lose their jobs, because their support systems are so bad because they don't hire enough people, or give them enough time with customers, or training, to actually help them very much. I know how to completely tear down the network without them instructing me how to do it.

What does ActivityPub does that RSS doesn't?

Off the top of my head, it's not the ability to syndicate, RSS already does that. I can follow anyone on any server.

I think it's the timeline? And the ability to delete posts. Keeping all that in sync is a lot of work, and presumably a lot of traffic?

Also replies. If I reply to a post when viewing it on another server, the reply should show up under any other view of that post.

What else??

PS: Only thinking about features that are used by Mastodon to federate, not potential future features. If that were the rule, then RSS could do anything AP could do, right -- because you can always add the feature. So, just the features that are in use.

PPS: I posted this on Mastodon and may post it elsewhere, if I do I'll link them in here.

Back in the Valley some of my friends called me El Grandé.

Some still do.

Dave Jacobs has been playing with ChatGPT art, and sent me this one, and I thought it belonged here.

Dave Jacobs calls me El Grandé.

PS: You say the El part softly then pause on the G and add a slightly gutteral H before proceeding with rand and then stretch out the "ay" with a smile and you got it.

PPS: You could roll the R too, for fun, if you're into it.

PPPS: Guy Kawasaki calls me Beeeeeeg Stuffff.