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 had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated.

So this isn't just about rebooting the Democratic Party, it's also about rebooting the news.

We ask the voters, all Democrats, to rank their issues. And to elaborate on why these are their issues, for example you could say health care is important because you have a chronic disease you need treatment for, or the cost of education, climate change, freedom, whatever -- literally whatever your issues are, with the ability to customize.

This can work now because of AI. We can really get to know the voters. And what do we do with this? It's beautiful. When news comes out we can explain it in simple terms based on what your personal concerns are. And notice the information flows both ways. And you can flame all you want, the chatbot really doesn't care.

We have to go this way. No more 1000 page bills passed overnight and signed into law the next day. In fact we should ahve been prepared for the last one. We keep missing the windows, and it's had bad results to say the least.

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 the city will pay for it.

ICE is still out there, they changed the subject while NYC voted.

Think about who will speak for NYC.

Kathy Hochul, our governor, is the best of them. A strong forceful powerful leader. A lot of us will get behind her.

After that it's pretty freaking dismal.

I'm not even going to put their names in this tweet.

But I do name names in the podcast!

Oh life sure is interesting! 😀

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 API was very much like the API we did for Manila in the 90s. My instantaneous realization was that you could do a nice writing tool built on this API. I had to do it. And the result is WordLand, which I'm going to demo at WordCamp Canada in October.

WordLand is a good editor. For some people who write in WordPress it will be a godsend, and for others, a revelation. There should be a lot of editors in this space, because there is no one editor that's good for everyone.

I've made wpIdentity, the back-end of WordLandm open source, MIT License. There should be lots of great editors for WordPress, and they should all interop, not just by import/export, rather by letting the apps access the same files, so if I want to use two editors to work on my file, they should be able to. The open format I chose to use is Markdown. We would have used it in RSS if it existed when RSS 2.0 was coming out, but it didn't. We're making up for that now.

I want to go much further. I think WordPress has all that's needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it's always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It's a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho.

We've done a lot of work over a long time. Discovering WordPress at this level has been like time travel for me. This is where the work we did 20+ years ago went. It really is as if I was Rip Van Winkle, asleep for 20 years, who wakes up and found out that while he wasn't paying attention someone had built a whole city around the little village he came from.

Anyway, I really ramble, as always -- I apologize for that. But there are some good ideas in here, and it's a story I've been wanting to tell.

Dave Winer

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 time to overthrow the other model, the one controlled by journalism and wokeness. The Repubs are right about that.

Three key ideas:

• Think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine. (Rebecca Solnit in The Nation.)
• Due process is hanging by a thread. (Jessica Ramos on Twitter.)
• Journalism has to stop once it has informed people. (I said this myself in a recent blog post.)

The Martin Scorcese movie is Gangs of New York and the female star is Cameron Diaz (along with Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo Di Caprio).

John V. Lindsay was the doomed mayor of New York, with Robert Redford looks who was thought he could charm the NYC unions, is exactly the kind of mayor we don't need, ever, but especially not now.

"You'll know you're looking at a leader in the Democratic Party when they start running against the Democratic Party." (Again a self-quote.)

It's got to stop being fashionable to destroy people for disagreeing with you.

Working together. That's it.

PS: Reporters who hate ChatGPT should get over it. It's fantastic for finding references for quotes, far better than a search engine. See above. I found both sources for the quotes I used with links in about a minute using AI.

PPS: There's a post-election followup podcast episode. No spoilers! :-)

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 been very different, with this one being the most stressful, or so it seems, I remember almost nothing from the first and second rounds against Detroit and Boston, respectively. Both are fantastic teams, and I'm proud that the Knicks came out on top in both.

I've been drinking freshly brewed coffee during each of the games to be sure if the Knicks coaches need my advice that I am ready to go. So far they've been handling it on their own. But Jen and I, from our respective living rooms in Utah and New York are standing by if our help should be needed.

This is my voicemail to Jen this morning after getting a chance to gain a little perspective on last night's fantastic win.

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. Watch the interviews Alex Wagner did on MSNBC did with marchers in Hungary (looking for a link to the video). They have the clear eyes Americans are just starting to get. We'll look back on this having been an easy problem to solve back when we could have fixed it.

Look forward and imagine the value of a truly decentralized social network. It's within reach. Rather than put Bluesky at the center, put them at the edge. That's where they say the want to be. We can make that happen now.

What we need is two-way RSS on Bluesky, ie imperfect decentralization now, so we can re-establish contact and flow if they go down or sell out.

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 it takes us to learn new facts, and is able organize organize things to help us make better choices.

It really is amazing.

20 minutes

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.

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.

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.