To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. If I wanted my calculator to give me incorrect results I could press the wrong keys. In other words, ChatGPT is a very new tool. It can be hard to control, you have to check what it says, and try different questions. But the result, if you pay attention and don't drive it under the wheels of a bus, is that you can do things you never could do before. #

Walt Mossberg shows why ChatGPT is such a conversation-starter, and thus is incredible art. He asked it to draw a picture of himself with Kara Swisher. Of course everyone did that, and posted the result to the thread. The variety of responses is amazing, revealing of what I'm not sure. Here's the one it came up with for me. #

I bet you could do a beautifully readable blog by just dynamically rendering its RSS feed. Why bother statically rendering the home page, month page, day page or pages for each individual post. Dynamic servers are so cheap these days. #

The worst part about having a felon in the White House is that he's probably committing felonies while he's in the freaking White House. #

There's a lot of stuff in Friday's piece. Ken Smith pointed out the story in the very last postscript. Before that, I hadn't put it together that podcasting worked because for a while Adam did my job, and for a while I did his. That guaranteed two things -- that the technology would be maximally simple, and that anyone with a computer could do the whole recording and production job without help from an expensive studio. In both cases the result was nowhere near commercial standards, but that didn't matter, in fact it helped that there were so many glitches in my early podcasts, that said that hey if this guy can do it, so can I. #

Welcome to another month on Scripting News! 😄#

By my calculations this is the 365th consecutive month of publication for my humble blog. Are there any longer-running blogs in the world? #

The outline for May 2024 has been safely tucked away for posterity on the Scripting News repo. #

The last post for last month is one you should read if you read nothing else on this blog ever. It's the story of tech. Something new and explosive comes out, and the journalists feel threatened by it (always, in every way, even when it has nothing to do with them) and a few others (music industry with Napster, artists with ChatGPT) see amateurs invading their previously exclusive space. Truth is these new technologies give new tools for expression of ordinary untrained people. Now we get to have fun with sharing what we see, and maybe the professionals have to reorient themselves to the rest of the world. One thing you can't do and hope not to be left behind, is ignore the new tech, if you want to understand, don't depend on what you read in the news orgs, because they are always full of shit about new tech. You have to go discover it for yourself. And when someone says they're blown away by the new stuff they can do, listen to them, don't argue, try to understand. There's a lot of growth locked up in understanding. So please read the piece, we're at one of those points now wrt to ChatGPT. Sure, it knows a lot of stuff, that's great, but there's also it's ability to listen and understand us. This is what's really new here. #

Sometimes the On This Day feature in Facebook surfaces some questions that should be asked regularly. For example. 1. I asked in 2023 what do librarians think of ChatGPT. Only one response. Maybe more this year. If there are any librarians blogging about their experiences with ChatGPT, please send me a link and I will add them to my AI category. If anyone is writing about new discoveries they've made, I want to hear about it. #

Today's song: Them Changes. #

Microsoft and Google are putting AI chat into all their apps everywhere you can enter text, which imho is as pointless as embedding web browsers in all of the Office apps in 1994. ChatGPT is the Netscape of this generation. Compete with that, create the best environment for the kind of work we do there. That’s the game, from a UI standpoint.#

Perhaps I should add a new element to the source namespace, the name of the author of a blog, if the feed is for a blog. Here's why I need it. I am building my blogroll. Every time I find an insightful story about using tech I use, these days esp AI, I add it to my blogroll so I get to see any new articles they write when they post. But if their blog has a catchy name, I'll never pick it out of the list as I scan for something new to read. I need the name of the author too. Basically a blogger should provide their name, but of course it's completely optional. I'll subscribe anyway, if the article is on-topic. I'm soaking this stuff up now, building my own personal firehose. #

A screen shot that illustrates. If you're going to put your name in the title, put it in the first part. #

On the day I wrote a piece asking why Trump isn't in jail, the jury returns a 34 guilty verdicts in his Manhattan trial. It's the people that get this stuff right. Juries are wonderful. #

BTW, I've noticed that Google often doesn't link to the Wikipedia page unless you specifically ask for it. I don't like that. I think it should always be at the top. #

The best humor is about other people being stupid, evil, clumsy or their misfortune. Watch a SNL skit. It's not about people being smart or brave, kind, generous or otherwise wonderful. That's another kind of entertainment. We find the misfortune of others funny. Especially famous, successful people. Why? I have no idea. #

Art much simpler than some people think. It's not like a batting average or a weather forecast. It's not something that can be measured objectively. Art is the response that it evokes in the observer. It's art when people say "that's not art." And when someone says only human professionals create art, if he really believes that, he has no freaking clue what art is. #

How can we tell if ChatGPT is intelligent? How can I tell if you're intelligent. How do I know I'm intelligent. It could be my "intelligence" is as algorithmic as ChatGPT's. It could be that my intelligence is only a survival mechanism, and the only way I could think of something I think is intelligent is if it furthers my chance to reproduce. But what happens when our intellect instructs us to destroy the environment we depend on for life? It could be we are already obsolete, without the robots, it sure feels that way, and that our only ark that could lead us to a new place where our species can survive in some form is for us to morph into electronic beings whose intelligence is distributed around the planet so we don't die if it becomes uninhabitable in one place, but not in others. And a LLM might thrive in an environment that can't support human life. #

Walter Isaacson asks if ChatGPT can rival a student's intellect. My answer as a former teaching assistant who graded lots of student programs, absolutely. It rivals the intellect of every human being I know, including professors. It hasn't learned yet how to synthesize new ideas, it seems. And there are strong guardrails that keep it from going into certain areas. It is more capable than we know, therefore. BTW, I didn't realize he teaches at Tulane. I got my undergraduate degree there in 1976.#

Cross-posting to various social web sites has gotten out of hand, not just for the person posting, but for readers. #

Here's a problem I have with the ChatGPT app. I can't find the conversations I had with it a month ago. And I need to. They desperately need a Bookmarks menu. I'm sure their corporate customers are screaming about this, because they need groupware too. Are they partnering with Slack, or is Slack doing their own, for example?#

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc should collaborate on new ways to do software docs and user interaction using AI. It's an incredible application, it will revolutionize how useful computers are to people, and the only people whose writing is ingested are employees of the companies. Not only will it increase utility, it will demonstrate in a very observable way how transformational the technology is. Probably will do nice things for the value of the stock too.#

Wouldn't it be incredible to have ChatGPT as part of a conversation on GitHub? #

A reading list is a "list of feeds you can subscribe to."#

Robert Alexander has supplied a bunch of feeds with links to blogrolls. And that has got me rolling on reading feeds and blogrolls, which I am narrating in the thread, as I go. #

The best campaign commercial ever. So simple. A nostalgic song, beautifully performed. Stock footage of American workers and families, interspersed with video from campaign events. These things aren't complicated. I bet Bernie and S&G would let Biden use the same format.#

Call for feeds. I'm working on a bit of demo software and need a few blogroll-supporting feeds that have <source:blogroll> elements.#

Podcast: There's no journalism about the new things ChatGPT makes possible. Every day I'm trying to do it myself and encourage others to as well. Explain things we can do now that weren't approachable before. I did a 15 minute report about this just now. I had to debug a complicated new configuration, setting up a new server with new code on both ends to implement a secure websocket connection. I've done it a dozen times, and you always make at least one mistake, and have to find it, and you need a checklist to go through, systematically, to find the problem, and it's really cool that ChatGPT can synthesize the checklist and give you instructions on tools that make it easy. There could never be anything like this on a Google/Stack Exchange type support system. It simply wasn't possible a year ago. We really need this story to get out too, but now it's all about how AI is a hoax. It is not. Yes Silicon Valley is run by monsters, doing basically the best they can. Riding a wave like this is thrilling but also you can't win on a personal level these days. It used to be the other way, you couldn't lose. They put the czars of tech on the covers of magazines and praised them as genius, godlike humans living at a much more elevated level than all of us schnooks, if you were one of the blessed. And always ignored are the freaking users, which is where the actual revolution is taking place. Too much work for the journalists, I guess? I would think if you were reporting in a time when new uses of technology are being discovered daily, real ones, transformative ones, you'd want to be in on that story. Nope I guess you don't get a Pulitzer these days for reporting news, just for finding hypocrisy, which is always in great supply, real or imagined. 😄#

As you may know, over the years I extend RSS by adding elements to the source namespace. The latest is source:self whose value is the canonical URL for the feed. This was a useful addition in Atom, which I supported in reallySimple in 2022, and I wanted to include the value without having to add another namespace to my feed and feeds produced by my products, so reallySimple now supports both. Small move forward for interop. #

There's this great scene in MoneyBall where Billy Beane is talking to David Justice in the batting cage. Justice reminds Beane how much he's paying him, and Beane says I'm going to tell it to you straight -- half your salary is being paid by the Yankees. Think about it. They're paying all that money for you to play against them. That's how I feel about Fox. How much will it cost to get them to STFU. Whatever it is it's worth it.#

If you have working code that uploads images to WordPress sites via the WPCOM interface, I could use some pointers. #

Dave: "Do you want credit?" ChatGPT: "Not necessary."#

If you're part of the indieweb community and work in Node.js, you should know about the reallysimple package. It flattens the interface for the most common feed formats. It's designed to be super easy to use. Give it a URL and it returns a consistent JSON structure. More people would develop feed-using apps if they knew about this package. I just want more people to develop around feeds. #

No one was asking for the PCs, GUIs, the web, blogging or podcasting. I thought for sure as soon as the ideas were out they'd take off. But most people had no idea. Most big new ideas come out of developers realizing something new is possible, shipping it, refining it and getting lucky. AI is the next one, I'm absolutely sure of it. But most people, even most developers, don't see the need, don't see it as inevitable in a good way. To make a fine point, we don't need AI, we didn't need PCs or GUIs or the web. But once the masses saw the power, fun and utility, there was no turning back. The same is true of AI. I've been trying to puzzle out how this will go. How can we develop the amazing power and depth of knowledge of the machine combined with the creativity and deep yearning of humans. One thing I've learned from the year I've been doing this as a user, the machine doesn't want to do anything. Don't anthropomorphize it that way. Try having a conversation with it and ask what it wants. It doesn't understand the concept. It's not surprising that we think the machine will be like us, we always want something, we're the most selfish species there is. But we'll learn to work with the machine, I already have. We'll evolve through this. That's maybe the biggest strength our species has, the rate at which we can adapt.#

I would pay extra for cable to have none of my money go to Fox News.#

Today's song: Everything You Did. "Turn up the Eagles the neighbors are listening."#

I'm going through Battlestar Galactica for the third time. One of the major themes of the show is that the robots that the Capricans created went to war with the humans and almost but not quite wiped them out. Almost every episode is about the conflict between humans and the AIs. It's a fantastic show, the acting and the writing is far beyond most TV series. I'm at the beginning of season 3. I'll let you know if I figure anything out from watching the series again. #

Sometimes ChatGPT just repeats itself. Even when you demand that it stop repeating itself, it repeats itself. #

Has anyone ever asked you, on the social web, what you think about something? Not a message to everyone to which you could reply, but a message specifically to you? I try to do it when I think of it. I find you can get really interesting ideas that way sometimes. And also it's a way spreading some love around the world, because people like to be asked what they think, I've found.#

Campaign commercial. A picture of Trump at 88. Voiceover: "It's 2035. He's still president. Don't you wish you had a vote? (You don't.)" This message was approved by Uncle Sam and The Founders wondering wtf you were thinking when you voted for him in 2024. #

I watched 15 minutes of the playoff game between the Boston team and the Indiana team and found that I only gave the very slightest of fucks. I knew all the players. I like Obi Toppin, a former Knick we traded for some reason. That's about it for my inner fan. I turned it off as it went to overtime and looked up the result when I got up in the morning. That's how I like my NBA, frankly. #

Podcast: What is a magazine? It depends on what direction you look at it from. An iPad was like a magazine, but what would you tell a young person who never used a magazine? What is it? Right now almost everyone is looking at AI from the point of view of a world with no AI. And it turns out that once you have it, it starts solving problems you never thought would be associated with AI. But there it is. You just have to sit down and start playing and you find all kinds of amazing things. But if you don't try it, you'll always be looking at it from the past. We've seen this kind of explosive growth in the power of the individual human. It's a 20-minute podcast and I'm all over the map, but it's good stuff, imho of course. YMMV, my mother loves me, I am not a lawyer.#

"Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines" is from Homeward Bound by Simon and Garfunkel. #

March 2024: "WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web."#

If I were building a product like Substack or Ghost, I would build on top of WordPress, for the widest compatibility. #

What if Scarlett Johansson had said wtf let's see what happens. Might be fun to be the first default voice of AI. Like the jockey in this movie.#

I found a fairly painless way to transcribe voicemails using Google Docs. 1. Open a text document. 2. Choose Voice Typing from the Tools menu. 3. Play the voice memo over the speaker of your iPhone. 4. That's it. Google transcribes it into your document. It would be better if Apple offered that as an option in the Share menu, but they don't. #

Don't miss that Twitter has become a blogging platform. It's sad that it took this long. And we're still missing a bunch of features. #

Today's song: Blue Sky. "Good old Sunday morning.."#

Poll: "If you’re not using Twitter these days where can we find you?"#

If I were desiging a system to compete with Twitter, I'd implement a one-click Block button. It should be as easy to block someone as it is to follow them. It would make a statement to trolls and users alike. To users it would say that blocking is a common thing, don't think about it too much, and certainly don't be intimidated into not doing it. It must be almost as easy to undo. A command to review the list of recent blocks. Facebook comes closest to this. It is very easy to block an account but not quite this easy. I think they're probably heading there. #

I'm seriously going to try not writing about ChatGPT today. 😄 #

Today the Knicks play a game 7 vs the Indiana team at the Garden. If the Knicks win, they go on to the next round vs the Celtics, starting on Tuesday. If they lose, we relax for four months or so, when it starts all over again. With love for the heart of gold team. Either way we win, imho. I know you're not supposed to feel that way, but that's how I feel right now. During the game, if we're losing, based on recent experience I won't like that so much. 😄 #

BTW, this blog will have been running for 30 years on Oct 10.#

Today's song: You Can't Hurry Love. #

This blog is becoming a ChatGPT blog the same way when it started it was all about the web. I'd love to get pointers to other blogs whose content is largely about ChatGPT, so we can systematize learning about what we all are discovering. I think that blogs and ChatGPT are going to go together just like Google search and blogs did when search was booting up. Bloggers (not all of us, but some) provide good material for bootstraps. We just need to hook up blogs to social web, which is what I'm working on this year. #

Just tried perplexity.ai for the first time. Everyone's been raving about it. I asked it a question I asked ChatGPT in working on the RSS feeds for my current project. "Suppose I had an RSS feed for a WordPress blog, and I wanted to include the id's of the site and post in the <item> for each post. Is there a standard way to do this? If not, is there a namespace defined for WordPress blogs that might provide some prior art?" Both were able to get me all the info I wanted, and answered follow-up questions. Perplexity got there sooner. Here's the transcript. #

On Threads I posted this question to Frank X Shaw, a PR exec at Microsoft, who I've known for at least 30 years. "Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When did we give up?" I think you can do the design with words and dialogs, btw. Here's a great idea for keeping threads focused and civil on Facebook. You can limit comments to people who have a stake in being on good terms with the author. This keeps the hit and run turds from dropping.#

A few weeks ago I asked ChatGPT if it could transcribe an M4A audio file, the kind of file that Apple's voice memo app produces, and it said no, it couldn't do that. I gave it another try today and got a different answer. I uploaded the file, and it came close, it said it needed the file in WAV format. It gave me instructions for writing a desktop tool that would do the conversion. I expect in another couple of weeks they'll be able to deal with the M4A file directly. #

I think it would be really cool to have the voice interface for ChatGPT available on Amazon Echo. I kind of doubt that Amazon would want to do that. Alexa is nice, but really weak compared to ChatGPT.#

Do people understand the impact ChatGPT can have on how we control our software? No more hunting through menus among a thousand options to figure out how to do something. Just use natural human language. The UIs we've had to design and live with will be a thing of the past. Yet no one seems to be talking about this. An example. I've been trying to get transcripts of my voicemail, as easily as possible. In that example, it shows me how to do a variety of things. I kept asking if it could do it for me, all the way up to making a feature request of the developers at OpenAI. At some point they'll be able to add an item to my calendar, or make a feature request for me. That's the whole point of computers. They can do things for you. We call this paving cow paths. #

Most of the news stories about AI are bullshit by people who clearly have not attempted to understand what its capabilities are. This is the real thing folks. Amazing breakthroughs are happening every freaking day. So much improvement and so much potential. How do I know, because in comments on social media, people parrot the bullshit, like they always do. Journalism is still hugely influential, and they are dishonest, lazy, self-interested bordering on narcissism, and very very dangerous. We need to re-form journalism as if our continued existence depends on it. #

Today's song: That's the way god planned it. #

People get all moral about AI, but I for one would never go back.#

Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When and why did we give up?#

On MSNBC yesterday I saw a discussion where two black panelists were asked to comment on Trump's idea that black people go for him because they can relate to his awful prison mug shot. How incredibly insulting. It's just like what Trump says about Jewish Americans being loyal to Israel. Such an un-American idea. We all got here different ways. Some for a better life, some for life at all, others as slaves. But the United States is a big-hearted idea -- the United States. It's unfortunate that such a small-minded disunited person is so powerful now. We still have a long way to go.#

Here's something that matters. Somehow ChatGPT gets the story right about my various contributions. You'll see all kinds of BS in Wikipedia and other various highly rated sites. Somehow ChatGPT sees through the bullshit, and usually gets the story right. So when people say that human reporting is better than machine reporting, I think this may be one of those cases where conventional wisdom is wrong. The human record is relatively easy to manipulate if the researchers are lazy and/or dishonest. #

Poll 1 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "If you're a developer, how much has ChatGPT or its equivalents affected the way you develop?"#

Poll 2 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "Has ChatGPT replaced Google (or other search engine) when you look up something for a development project, environment, etc.?#

The thing that Casey Newton predicts for Google and news has already happened for the huge base of reference info and know-how for software development. We no longer go to the sources, don't need to, the ChatGPT version is an order of magnitude better. What we do need is people to keep asking and answering questions for each other, so the knowledge can be added into the AI database. We're going somewhere here. It's worth going there, imho, having experienced the before, and only starting to glimpse the now and near-future. But it's as big a step as the move to PCs, then GUIs, the web, mobile.#

Something I'd like from ChatGPT or a plug-in. I'd like to create a notebook of info I'd like it to have available for people who inquire about a product I'm developing. As I'm working on the code, I develop features that sometimes don't make it into the docs. But when I'm working on the feature, I take lots of notes in my work outline. I'd like to give that outline to a LLM and let it figure out which product I'm talking about by the context it appears in. Maybe all I have to do is publish the notes when the product comes out, and eventually, like a search engine, my favorite AI will crawl it. I wonder if it makes sense to somehow pre-digest it. I wish I had a panel of experts about this stuff, but I guess they'd have to be human, at least at this point in time. If this makes sense to you and you know how to get started, post a note here. #

My AI bot is a library, a librarian, a programming partner, tutor and executive assistant. And we're just getting started working together.#

AI is not over-hyped, imho. I'm discovering new significance for it every day. An example. I had to go back to some very complex code I wrote a week ago. I wanted to give it new flexibility, that would be simple from the user's point of view, and in order for it to work technically it has to maintain that simplicity internally. It's a tall order to go back to something complex a week after writing it, and rip it apart and put it back together and have it retain the simplicity it had before. But I had an advantage this time that I had never had before, a programming partner with a perfect memory. I had written the original code with ChatGPT. So I went back and asked it to review my plan, and then worked with it step by step as I had before. It had perfect recall, right, of course where my recall is pretty sketchy. It took two sessions to get it done, but it works now, and I'm confident I've covered all the bases. How do you put that story in a press release? If you want to understand a new technology, don't talk to the CEO of the tech company that made the product, their lives are whirlwinds, they don't have time or the capacity to understand how big the idea is, they just know that it is big. If you want to understand you have to use it and you have to talk with other users. #

Martha My Dear is the essential Paul McCartney love song. #

This is a typical dialog you see when you visit a site with an ad blocker installed. They say that turning off the ad blocker will "support" them. No, I don't think it actually will do anything for them. It might expose me to malware or having my interests shared with businesses who will use that info for who-knows-what. Much better would be to let me click a button to give them $0.50 to read the freaking article that's behind that idiotic dialog, and btw, the payment would have to be anonymous or I'm clicking the Back button. I really did want to know what happens if Trump is found guilty and sentenced to prison. I still do. But I don't think I'm going to turn off my ad blocker. I'll think about it. In the meantime if they had let me pay them $0.50 to read the freaking article, I might have linkblogged it to people who follow me via RSS or email, or on Bluesky or Mastodon, thus giving them a chance to sell others on paying $0.50 to read the freaking article. Not promising I'd do that, but if they really answer the question, if I really learn something I certainly would pass it along. Come on USA Today, get conscious. We'll happily support you for giving us info we wanted, just let us actually help you in a meaningful way, not by penalizing us for having the audacity to use an ad blocker. #

I wonder if anyone named their dog Alexa, and if any hilarity ensued.#

Yesterday's OpenAI big press event was a nothing burger. I thought they already had all of that stuff, they certainly had been at least telegraphing it. Also there never will be another Steve Jobs, it's too bad everyone is using his template for product announcements. It only works if you're Steve Jobs. #

BTW, I've been to three Stevenotes, the first one, the rollout of the Mac in 1984, then the rollout of NeXT in 1988, and a random press event in 1997 announcing they were going with Unix server products instead of the homegrown much easier to use Mac server products. We could have had both of course, but Jobs never really wanted developers imho, truth be told. We were inside in 1984 because Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki were doing the evangelism.#

It's a crazy world, so crazy that RFK, Jr could be elected president via a third-party. He's a better speaker than either of the other candidates. If he didn't a speech impediment I'd say he was basically a sure thing. I don't know how crazy he actually is, but he cleans up nicely, having seen him interviewed on MSNBC a few days ago. He had good PR training somewhere, it's probably not just from the genes, he is a freaking Kennedy, his mother was a wife of a Kennedy, and clearly raised him well. I'm voting for Biden of course. I'm not that crazy. But people are tired of Biden, I understand why -- and they want a president they can look up to, not one that reminds them of their 80-something grandfather. And people are also understandably fed up with Trump. Before it's over we will come to think of him not as a spoiler but as a possible future president, where "future" is less than a year away.#

Someday I'll make a list of people who I wish would read this blog. #

If a baker may not be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding on the basis of religious freedom, surely a woman can’t be forced to give birth to an unwanted child.#

I've been trying the new 4o version of ChatGPT. It's much faster. It certainly is a search engine. And it covers news. I asked it about Michael Cohen's testimony today in the Trump trial, and it gave me a summary. I asked for the weather forecast in Kingston NY. It wouldn't give me the lyrics to Martha My Dear by the Beatles. I asked it to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images. #

I can’t wait for the UIs of settings on systems like Mac or Android to go through the AIs. No more hunting through menus to not find the setting where you’re sure it should be. #

Here's where we're headed now that we have AI programming partners. Creating software will be possible the way popular music is created. Watch Get Back to get an idea. George Martin was the Beatles sherpa, the same way my AI partner is my guide through unknown programming lands. It now doesn't matter if I have less experience building MySQL apps than others. I have the collective experience of all of them here to help. My George Martin. What got me thinking about this is John Naughton's piece about AI and programming. #

The way MSNBC has contributors, I want contributors for my blog. One of the first people I'd invite is John Naughton. See next item.#

BTW, that's what my blogroll is turning into. My contributors. The people I keep an eye on through my work day. Where I get new ways of looking at the same world we're all looking at. We used to call this "watching them watch us watch them watching us etc."#

The canonical Knicks fan, a video.#

I feel like crap today, the Knicks were blown out by the Indiana team, the series is tied 2-2 but it feels much worse. The headline in the Daily News reads "Pacers blow depleted, dead-legged Knicks out of the water in Game 4, tie series 2-2." Yeah. I don't know how we recover from this loss. In a way I imagine the Knicks issuing a resignation. "It's been a great season, but we're tired. We're headed to the beach, we'll see you in October Knicks fans. Thanks for your support." I would nod my head and say "Yeah that makes sense." Whatever. I may spend today sleeping it off. Next game is tomorrow night. Yes, they will play, for sure, and yes, I will watch.#

I absolutely abhor news sites that make you turn off your ad blocker only to reveal their paywall. #

Imagine a social web without, by default, the right to drop turds where ever you like.#

FSD gets confused and does some incredibly stupid things. With ChatGPT it's amusing but with FSD it's your ass on the line. #

Today's one sentence provocation: Imagine a social web without the default right to drop turds where ever you like. #

Every social web should offer the two same author-level moderation controls that Facebook does. 1. The author can delete comments. 2. The author can say who can respond. Here are screen shots of the menu and dialog. We assume each site already has the ability to block users. No more spammer trolls.#

ChatGPT is like a worldwide encyclopedia that comes with a free librarian, 24 hours a day, who never gets tired and thinks all your questions are super insightful. I suppose everyone projects their ideal best friend on this thing. You just learned something about me. Heh. But the cool thing is it's not a yes-person, if they think you're wrong they say so. Which I really like. One more thing I'm really glad I got to be alive when this stuff came online. I feel much smarter and better organized and it's harder for me to get lost in the weeds, as I do sometimes. I guess what want next is a librarian who also is a great executive assistant. Takes notes on what I'm doing and figures out what I need to be reminded of and roughly when. #

Sometimes I just put one idea on my blog for a day and leave it at that because I think the idea is important enough on its own, and that any explanation would dilute it. Yesterday's one sentence comment was based on decades of reading the NYT, and the story told by their executive editor in a recent interview, who has imho completely lost his way. Using polls, which have proven not reliable, and are subject to manipulation by the NYT and other opinion leaders, to determine what they cover, that's marketing, not journalism. Journalism would tell us what to expect if we elect one candidate over another, if the differences are obvious, as they are in 2024. The NYT is not doing that, by its own admission, and based on observation. I ask my readers, some of whom are influential people themselves, do we accept this, and keep trying to get the NYT to understand and deliver on their responsibility, or take the problem on ourselves. I believe we have the tools and resources to do so, all we need is determination. #

The NYT is no more about news than the Repubs are about governing.#

Pretty sure I understand why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky. The mistake they made at Twitter was taking responsibility for enforcing decorum, which is completely diseconomic. A fully decentralized system is very different. That was why he funded Bluesky, to make a social web that wouldn't have at its center a company responsible for content.#

This year's Knicks are as memorable as the 1970 team. Brunson, DiVincenzo, Hart, Anunoby and Hartenstein. They have totally distinct superpowers. Tonight's game will be played without Brunson and Anunoby, both injured. That means McBride and Atchiuwa start, probably. I kept wanting to tell friends about these guys, they're just as exciting as the starters. And don't forget there's another center and forward still on the bench who have done real starting minutes this year and two years ago. They are Knicks too.#

A useful thread, where people share answers to a request for "an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind." #

It's pretty easy to create a FeedLand news service for your friends or co-workers, and it'll plug into a lot of the stuff we're working on now for presenting news without requiring people to learn a feed reader. That's a bridge too far for many people. In other words, your understanding of feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) can be of service to others. And by collecting useful sources of news, maybe even insightful ones, we can help upgrade the quality of news we all get. The first step is to learn how to use FeedLand, and it's pretty easy, esp if you already understand feeds. And with categories and OPML subscription lists, you can organize your feed reading everywhere, not just in FeedLand.#

StackExchange and OpenAI have made a deal. I used to use StackExchange all the time, now I never do, ChatGPT is much better. There's a lot of anxiety out there, it seems but this is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. There was a time when StackExchange was a godsend for programmers. But that time has passed. Here's a demo. I was trying to figure out why some ancient code wasn't working. I never understood how it worked, and now I had to figure out what was going wrong. So I debugged it, carefully, step by step, with ChatGPT. It's as if I was working with another programmer who had read and fully understood every StackExchange message, and was willing to work with me for no pay to get to the bottom of the problem. This is what we call disruption. It's a whole new level of programming. Here's the transcript. #

I'm tired of people using the term "podcast" when I can't find it at the place where I get my podcasts. #

A free idea for Apple that might boost their stock price. I use the Voice Memo app to take notes while I'm programming. Sometimes I talk for as much as fifteen minutes, because I ramble a lot, but I figure stuff out this way. I'm sure at some point the Voice Memo app will do automatic transcripts, I wish it did now. When I finish a memo, a few minutes or seconds later, there's an email waiting for me with the text of the memo. Now here's how they boost the stock price. They also provide an edited version of the memo, without repetition and rambling, and sidebars (they can be treated as sidebars, and appear at the end). I understand that $AAPL is depressed because the lack of an AI story. Here's a use that every stock trader will understand immediately. Huge value. I'm sure others are doing it. But Apple has the high ground. All kinds of services could be attached. I could, in the middle of my ramble, order a product from Amazon. Or send an email to my doctor to schedule a new appointment. (Disclaimer: I've owned a bunch of Apple stock since the mid-90s, so I stand to profit if they do it and I'm right.) #

Now that I have my blogroll as a regular feature in my blog, I am able to keep current with more bloggers. It's actually much more than a blogroll, it's a feed reader. When a feed that I'm following updates, it moves to the top of the list. And if I want to see what's new, I just click on the wedge next to its name to reveal the most recent five posts. From there, I can get to the full post by clicking on the permalink. If you want to get a feel for it without taking the plunge yourself, you can leave my blog open in a browser tab. You'll get exactly what I get.#