Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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Note: I posted this from WordLand manually due to the error I keep encountering below.

Dave Winer is still diggin’. WordLand appears to be his latest blogging tool (see above).

I don’t know anything about it but thought I’d try it out since I was a fan of many of his older blogging tools (Radio, 1999, FeedLand, and many more).

Dave recently announced how he’s been setting up ChatGPT to provide WordLand support.  Interesting idea. Let’s see where this goes…

Update:

Apparently it’s not going very well – at least not for me. anyway.

WordLand is able to see my WordPress site just fine (as shown above) but when I try to post to it I get the following error:  “The Jetpack site is inaccessible or returned an error: Jetpack: [http_request_failed] A valid URL was not provided. [-10520]”

I’ve tried all the recommendations from the ChatGPT WordLand support but the problem remains.

Ah, well. It was a fun experiment but it doesn’t seem to work for me.  I hope others can have fun with WordLand.

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“… when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life, that’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life, and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it. You can mold it. 

That’s maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important. And however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better. Because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Source: Steve Jobs Secrets of Life (YouTube)

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I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distributed systems, which will take a good three months in the first pass, and many more months to build competence after that.If you are practical and coding oriented you may not like my advice much. You may object saying, “Shouldn’t I learn distributed systems with coding and hands on? Why can I not get started by deploying a Hadoop cluster, or studying the Raft code.” I think that is the wrong way to go about learning distributed systems, because seeing similar code and programming language constructs will make you think this is familiar territory, and will give you a false sense of security. But, nothing can be further from the truth.

Distributed systems need radically different software than centralized systems do. –A. Tannenbaum

Source: Learning about distributed systems: where to start?