Scripting News podcast
Podcasts from Dave Winer, editor of the Scripting News blog, since 1994.
Thu, March 20, 2025
We still need universities
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 a tool to grow and evolve, to create new stuff. But we didn't finish the job, Silicon Valley did. And we got a result similar to what we'll get if we let the Musk process go forward much further. It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else. The new AI technology is not ready to run the world. The rich people should use their own wealth to build something great and then show the rest of us how to use it. That's the proper role for Silicon Valley, not to rule. Lots of ideas buzzing around, but yet all this seems so freaking familiar. 22 minutes. PS: Developing better Developers blog post.
Fri, February 14, 2025
Dems must campaign 365 days every year
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 stage teaching and they're in the audience listening. It's so simple, we need to market, to sell, to position the opposition and ourselves. Kamala Harris was doing it, it was great. When we lost the election all communication stops. That's when you need to ramp it up. We have no leadership, no coaching, no simple ideas to bring it home. That's the main reason we continue to lose and now we're not just losing elections, we're losing our world. In this podcast I start with a story of how I was recruited to lead a rally on a bus from NYC to DC in 1971 as very small part of a march against the Vietnam war. That's where I learned that in a country where the people rule, we have to be part of the government. We can't wait for the Dems to lead us, they never will. Instead we have to lead them. That will work, when we do it. All we need is campaign and money management, and people who do great advertising. We have to bring the war home, be a source of good information for our voters. Right now the Repubs are the only ones speaking, with predictable results. 21 minutes. PS: I mention Natural Born Blogger in this podcast. PPS: There's a transcript .
Tue, January 28, 2025
The Repubs are trying to kill you
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 people to determine whether you survive the next pandemic, and btw there's one brewing, you can see how fast by how high the prices of chicken are. I've thought we should have a Qanon of our own, that tells the truth about what's actually happening, not in the vague bullshit terms the Pelosi's et al explain them. Their time is past, they lost the whole fucking government. If we let them continue to speak for us, a lot of us are going to be dead. It really is that serious. It's time to use the media we have to organize and refine the truth down to simple terms everyone can understand. I hope you listen. There is a transcript .
Mon, January 13, 2025
It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat
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 .
Wed, January 08, 2025
How I view WordPress
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 and others who made great fortunes and had great power for a long time. But I usually only care about that when it's in my way. Right now I see a huge need for a tools for writers that builds on WordPress. The opportunity has been there for the full 20+ year history of the product. Because of who I am and what I did in blogging systems before WordPress, I have a perspective on what's missing, and I see the potential for a large market for writing and other creative tools that simplify the process. There's too big an opportunity to let the economics of the platform on a large scale get in the way of moving forward. I'm going for it. In this podcast I offer some of my experience being deeply entrenched in platforms that were going in directions I couldn't go in with them. It's painful to give up. I empathize. But I'm in a different place. I'm a 50+ year developer, about to turn 70, and feeling my age. This may be my last big project. I think WordPress will be around and evolving for many years to come. I want to make a contribution, and I don't have time to wait for all this to be resolved. There is no other platform that can do what WordPress can do now. So this is where I've made my bet. So I'm going ahead, and I'm going to try to stay away from the problems, and just try to make some good software and make some users happy. 😀 A place for comments and questions about this podcast. There is a transcript .
Thu, December 19, 2024
Don't let ChatGPT strategize for you
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, conversational simulated programming partner, that has infinite knowledge of everything. But unfortunately not the best judgment." There's a transcript .
Mon, December 09, 2024
We all own and no one owns podcasting
I keep having to answer the question of what I think about Podcasting 2.0, I thought I should say it clearly, in a podcast of course. 😀 A lightly edited quote from this cast: "Podcasting is in trouble and needs our help and it needs good ideas that accentuate the power of having no boundaries between different voices. You can listen to my podcast and you can listen to one that comes from somebody else, from a big company if you want to. There are no gatekeepers. There's nobody who controls what you can listen to here. And that's important. That's powerful. That makes it a place for creativity, and for art, and for really unpopular ideas, because it's open." It's insidious to form an organization whose name says you own the future of something that is open. Even the W3C wasn't that brazen, even Apple said they wanted developers to innovate on their platform. But claiming to be the 2.0 of something as hugely consequential as podcasting is not supportable and I can't overlook it. I've proposed an innovation in podcasting, for the benefit of everyone, and I could have done it even if I didn't even know what a freaking podcast is (but I do). I'm tired of people trying to own things that are unownable. There's a transcript .
Thu, December 05, 2024
Don't give him any ideas
"I hope this doesn't give Trump any ideas" is what I thought when I heard that the president of South Korea had out of the blue declared martial law . You probably thought it too. I decided it was time to tell the story of how we elected Trump even though we had a 4-year demo, including COVID and an attempted overthrow of the US government. We knew who he was, and we said give us more of that. We are out of our minds. Includes a transcript . PS: Recorded on Tuesday, published on Thursday. PPS: It turns out the president of South Korea was actually trying to give Trump an idea. PPPS: The people of South Korea told the president to go to hell.
Tue, November 26, 2024
We elected Archie Bunker
Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating. This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete. Here's a transcript .
Tue, November 19, 2024
We found the kamalahq team!
I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing. Meanwhile the other party, starting when Trump discovered Twitter, was on the air 24-by-7-by-365 every freaking year whether or not there's a presidential election. Their voters are led, ours are left to drift around in the wind, asked to resist with no answer to the question How? We have no leadership. Now we may be able to get the Harris campaign back on the air on the social web. We found the team that did it. Like the rest of us they lost their way on Election Day which was only two weeks ago, believe it or not. Anyway I wanted to share the good news. There are links on my blog for today. PS: Here's a transcript .
Wed, November 13, 2024
A Wednesday morning ramble
We start with what didn't work about the election of 2024 as the question du jour, and the answer is basically everything. The Democratic Party is a funnel which tries to funnel what the elites think we need without triggering Jake Tapper or Maggie Haberman or the publisher of the NYT. As the Bidens discovered this is a hopeless cause, so no one liked Joe, and they didn't have a feel for Kamala, and they aren't wrong they're right. The world changed and it's time for the old Democratic party to be replaced by a completely new version, as happened already with the Repubs. We're going to be much better at what we believe in, as they are much better at what they believe in. Our goals won't change, but we'll have candidates that rise from the people, instead of being filtered and handed down from above. We're not connecting with people because they're not connecting with the people we give them. These people do know how to run the US government, but they aren't doing it the way we want them to. Change isn't happening fast enough to keep up with the demands of a changed country. I doubt if the Dems would disagree with that. Okay we see how to fix this. I explain in this long ramble, if you're patient enough to listen that long!
Thu, October 24, 2024
WordPress is too valuable to overlook
The piece that inspired this post. The net-net is that WordPress is everything that remains of what's useful in the blogging world. It carries the banner for the format writers need to be able to communicate meaningfully, which I call textcasting . I wanted to develop a writing tool for WordPress because it needed to start developing in that direction. There should be hundreds of ways to write with WordPress, and it should be able to flow writing through all the social networks. That's the idea. It's doable, now, more so than ever before. And then once we have that working, we can see what's next. But the writer's web has been reduced to a small fraction of its potential. I think this may be a time when people will be looking for something new, but there doesn't need to be a cost. You don't have to pick up your whole thing and move somewhere else, we can build on what WP already is. It's a 37 minute podcast, that also includes a long story about Napster, how revolutionary it was, and how the music industry failed to see the value in having all the music availalbe to everyone in one place. All the applications of music that didn't happen because of their approach. We're lucky now that it's all in one place, and the software underlying that is open source, and the APIs are clonable. And the social web is just beginning to get it together, and btw Mastodon is sitting there ready for us to play with them. You just have to make the software, work with others and connect the dots.
Sun, October 20, 2024
Warning: Musk could push Trump over the top
In 2017 I wrote that Twitter, which had just elected the US president could be bought for $12 billion. (In the podcast I got the number wrong.) Given that the US budget is over $6 trillion, and the assets of the government are worth much more, this was a bargain. Not only did VCs not see this, but Elon Musk did. People kept saying he overpaid for it at $44 billion, but I have a hunch he may be able to make them eat their words. Anyway, the leadership of the Democratic Party should play close attention to what he's doing, and don't dismiss the waste of money, or whatever you see that he's doing wrong. He hires clever people who see their way around corners that you probably don't. He has better tools that you, in many ways. His server capacity is world class. And obvious brainpower and creativity. I was right in 2017 and right now in 2024. He could make the difference that puts Trump over the topo. The quote I cited was by Ann Richards at the 1988 DNC. "He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple."
Tue, October 08, 2024
Editor => WordPress => Mastodon
Quick podcast explaining what worked today that blew my mind . I surprised myself by editing a post that appeared in WordPress and Mastodon at the same time, with no loss of fidelity. We're pretty damned close to the ideal of textcasting . How about that! Sorta snuck up on me. Bing!
Mon, October 07, 2024
Pseudo code and kitchen table conversations
Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics. 1. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system is almost ready to work at that level. With a few more iterations by human designers it should all meet up in a place where the slogging type work I've been doing for 50+ years will be obsolete. We will all become anachronisms. All of us. Get ready for it. And btw I was the biggest skeptic of the idea of a higher level more human way of programming. Scoffed at the idea. Repeatedly. Never say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. 2. The second part is about kitchen-table conversations in families, the bored rantings of our ancestors, passed on lovingly from generation to generation. Should have realized that we did not turn a racial corner with the election of Obama, we all should have gotten prepared for the backlash from children of the slavers and fascists, who were raised alongside us as victims of slavery and fascism were raised to feel persecuted. We all revert to our comfortable roles. The question is can we rise above that and forget for a moment what our ancestors taught us as gospel and take an interest in going beyond that, or do we have to do another loop around the genocide and its consequences, which this time will be far worse than they were in the 1940s because of all the new war and computer tech and the damage done by the post-war growth. I feel good about this podcast, because it has nothing to do with the milestone. I have an idea of what it feels like to have been blogging for 30 years, but no conclusions to offer that would mean anything to me or anyone else, except perhaps a psychologist. I've been watching a lot of sports recently and the interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. That is probably why they have so much trouble reporting the truth about Trump and Musk. It doesn't fit into their job description, it's not in anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth.
Wed, October 02, 2024
The Podcast0 Feed
My fifth podcast release today, the others were all on the Podcast0 feed , which I explain is the flow of two feeds, Morning Coffee Notes and Trade Secrets. Also the idea of subscription lists you subscribe to, the next level of power in feeds, which should be imho supported broadly by all apps that implement OPML subscription lists, which is a pretty strong standard in the world of feed readers, which of course includes podcast clients. The users are so powerful when they realize they have the power. In the case of OPML lists, they are very very functionally powerful. That power always faces off with the famous programming priesthood and now is no different. I see the opportunity to get some more power for users, if a few developers are willing to go along. Thanks for listening! 😀 52 minute podcast .
Tue, September 17, 2024
Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere
I want to talk about interop among the products that do more or less what Twitter does, including Twitter. I think we're doing a replay of the way hypertext developed in the 80s, and then took off when TBL produced a much simpler product with one-way links instead of two. It made developing a website a matter of writing a text file and uploading it to a server. Almost no configuration. Same kind of experience with Napster, in a minute you had access to all the music of the world. It was super easy to use, that was key to it being a breakthrough. Over and over, it's simplicity that has made new technology take off. That a developer without much training but a big idea can put something together in an afternoon or a weekend. We need that kind of interface for the same kind of explosion to happen between the twitter-like products. Also I am using a recorder app from Google that automatically produces a transcript , so here it is. 27-minute podcast .
Tue, September 10, 2024
Twitter President Kamala
Harris must become president of Twitter before becoming president of the United States. After the debate, Harris should be interviewed anywhere they'll have her. Go ahead and be overexposed. Answer every question with one of your major positioning statements. Call in to radio talk shows, podcasts, whatever you can think of. Biden hardly ever promoted himself. Not being heard all the time was his biggest sin. Harris should get accustomed to being accessible when she's in office. Keep the kamalahq snark channel going. This will have been Trump's contribution to American politics, no fear of being heard. BRIC countries == Brazil, Russia, India and China. Brazil's population is 215 million, US is 333 million, so Brazil is 64% of US. When we win the Twitter presidency we will have Jumped the Trump. 😇 12 minute podcast .
Sun, August 25, 2024
Kamala's acceptance speech
Full audio for Kamala Harris's acceptance speech at the DNC. Thanks to Ian Landsman for converting the video to MP3. My blog post about the speech. Podcast: 37 minutes .
Thu, August 22, 2024
Why I feel bad about Biden in a personal way
Podcast: 17 minutes . Note: You can skip the first five minutes, it's a long preamble on a different subject. I left it in because it's interesting imho. It's possible that what happened to Joe Biden in the debate is like something that happened to me almost ten years ago when I was turning 60. I tell the story in this podcast. It's still possible he was the best choice to go against Trump. We'll know soon enough. But there's something to learn here. No one wants their life to be over. No one wants to be thanked. They want you to let them keep going. The thing is that all through life people say you can't do what you then go on to do. It happens over and over. One day, after a life of accomplishment, you realize everyone refers to you in the past tense, but you're still here, you want to keep doing the stuff you do so well. But they won't let you. That's why I feel bad about what happened with President Biden, because I've had the experience myself. Anyway what's done is done, we all have to get behind soon-to-be President Harris. And stand behind her as she is attacked, and they try to get rid of her. Anyway, the substance of this podcast, which I recorded yesterday, doesn't start until 5:25. Up until then it's a rambling story about Fox News and how a little truth slipped out when they covered the assassination attempt on Trump a few weeks ago. You can skip over that part if you don't find it interesting, but I hope you do listen to the part when I had an experience that may have been like Biden's at the debate, and how it was probably just a panic attack -- these things happen -- our candidates are people, and they have bodies that do strange things sometimes. No matter what I feel for Biden and that's the story I wanted to tell here. Thanks for listening. :smile:
Wed, August 21, 2024
ChatGPT slows down my programming, and that's good
Podcast: 27 minutes . Sorry about the recording quality, I was in a large space with bad acoustics. I'll try to remember not to do that in the future. I've noticed I spend less time programming, I go more slowly and carefully because now I can know a lot more about each problem I'm solving, and use the packages I build on, jQuery, MySQL, Node, the browser, Bootstrap, Font-awesome, Frontier, to greater advantage. A new kind of programming is possible, and it's better. I go into some detail in this podcast about how the process works. Interested in hearing similar stories from other developers using ChatGPT or something like it.
Thu, August 15, 2024
Musk is just getting started
Podcast: 11 minutes . I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah. It's bullshit . In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built. It turns out creating a president of the United States is worth a lot of money. Trump is inept at squeezing the money out of it, he's a loudmouth who proved one thing, Twitter is all you needed in 2016 to get elected president. That's going to change, as competition shows up (Zuckerberg, for example, with Threads). They know, even if you don't -- that it can be very profitable to own the presidency. If Trump loses, Musk won't get it on this round, but eventually he will own a big piece of the president, and then he will move his deals with SpaceX and Tesla up a notch. Listen to the podcast , it's only 11 minutes. You probably haven't considered this angle, but I promise you he's moving, and he's mostly unopposed right now. He's not the nudnick so many people seem to think he is.
Sat, August 10, 2024
Why Walz was the perfect choice
Lakoff talks about the Nurturing Mother and the Strict Father as models for Democrats and Republicans respectively, and how the Dems never got this, and never campaigned accordingly. Now they're doing it. Owning the nuturing mother mode, but also the Protective Father, tough and angry when necessary, but a fun dad, a sweetheart. Biden was that, but we caught him too late in life for that to really flourish, hence the low approval ratings. I think we can afford now to ignore the NY Times et al. We don't just want freedom, we are free, now. That's what we're feeling. Now we're an army and we're ready to march. We're ready to fight and our weapons are our feet, our voices and our votes. This is why it's working. At first I didn't like White Dudes for Harris but now I get it. I saw a guy who'd normally I'd think of as a MAGA, in the crowd behind Kamala yesterday while she spoke, I thought yeah us old white dudes need permission to have sweet hearts. It's time for us to be happy too. Why the f not. BTW, Bush had the highest approval in history after 9/11. 90%. Models for the Protective Father with President Kamala. 7-minute podcast .
Fri, August 09, 2024
My first ChatGPT app
4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API. There's an accompanying GitHub repo , with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser. Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle. Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is. Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do. Don't know why I waited so long. :smile:
Sun, August 04, 2024
It's time to create our own media, again
We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done it without Twitter letting him go direct to organize? The Harris organization is doing great, they have to take on the journalists, where previous Democrats had no answer, they've done it in a clever way, by using their channels to talk about the things journalism should be talking about. People listen to their competition, and that's what this is. It's not hard for a few of us, who are good listeners and writers, to build lists of sources and provide them for people to access away from the nonstop (often entertaining) bullshit of the social web of 2024. I've asked for ideas for podcasts that would go into a list of shows people who are voting Democratic would find interesting or useful. Not for spreading religion, but based on facts, not the unhinged lunacy and revenge of Trump. Our news now is too polluted by that. He shouldn't be able to lie about Harris's race, and have that be an issue carried by journalism, for example. That should not be possible but it happens. Podcast: 12 minutes .
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