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.
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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.
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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.
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Someday I'll make a list of people who I wish would read this blog.
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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.
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Jalen Brunson, Knicks star, after having his ass kicked in Sunday's game.
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- In this picture he either looks dangerous or defeated, or both. I wouldn't want to have to play against him tonight. #
- Here's my two cents. If Brunson has heavy legs tonight, as he clearly did in the last two games, he should be used as a decoy, to draw a double team, to free up one of the Knicks' assassins. Or maybe he'll be more effective with just one Pacer guarding him, instead of two or three. #
- And for crying out loud, start one of the excellent bench players, McBride or Sims or Burks, or all of them, and make sure the heroes of games 1 and 2 get plenty of rest. #
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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I absolutely abhor news sites that make you turn off your ad blocker only to reveal their paywall.
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Imagine a social web without, by default, the right to drop turds where ever you like.
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FSD gets confused and does some incredibly stupid things. With ChatGPT it's amusing but with FSD it's your ass on the line.
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- I asked ChatGPT to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images. #
Weather map.
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Today's one sentence provocation: Imagine a social web without the default right to drop turds where ever you like.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The NYT is no more about news than the Repubs are about governing.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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- This is a hard idea to get across, but there's nothing wrong with a news organization favoring things they depend on to exist.#
- For example, a news org that covers San Jose, CA is entitled to favor San Jose. It's okay for them to do things that help San Jose in competition with other cities. They could sponsor a food drive for the neediest in their community. It wouldn't be a conflict of interest, because it's understood that they have an interest in the success of San Jose. #
- A columnist that covers the NY Mets can be happy when the Mets win the World Series, and sad when they don't. This is not an integrity issue, or something they need to disclose, unless it's not obvious that they cover the Mets.#
- In that sense, every news org in the United States depends on the First Amendment, so it can be assumed they're in favor of democracy, because without it they couldn't exist. #
- This is why the editor of the NYT's statement about not favoring democracy is so ridiculous. He can't be objective about that, because the existence of his organization depends on the continuation of democracy in the US.#
- Whether he knows it or not, he's against Trump and in favor of the Democrats in the upcoming election.#
- Sometimes it's hard to see what's totally obvious. Ask a fish about water and they'll say there is no such thing. Same with free speech and the NYT. They are a product of free speech, without it, it makes no sense, doesn't work. But that's been true forever, so it feels like a given, but it isn't.#
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.
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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.
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I'm tired of people using the term "podcast" when I can't find it at the place where I get my podcasts.
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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.)
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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.
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I said this to a friend recently, in an email: “I noticed a change with the doctors, where earlier they would dismiss my fears of having this or that fatal disease, now they're always looking for the thing that's going to kill me.“ The friend, a retired English professor, said the sentence was very effective. Part of me would like to send the sentence and the review to my freshman English professor, I think she would be proud. Instead I decided to blog it.
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BTW, I was struck that famous editor and writer
Ben Smith said he was ashamed at starting out as a blogger, on an MSNBC show hosted by a
true hack. The quote was from
Jeff Jarvis, who like me,
cross-posts to a variety of social webs, presumably manually. Where did I put my comment? Hell if I know. Heh I
found it. My comment: "I didn’t know he had been a blogger. So my respect for him went up dramatically in an instant, and in another instant, plummeted. What’s wrong with people?" Bad news for Ben, he's still is a blogger, btw, in his heart. I can tell. And true journalists and true bloggers share an ethos that the fakers like Morning Joe will never understand. So I guess when you're on with Joe you have to pander. Just remember Ben, we know who you are. Even if you have forgotten.
😄#
I asked ChatGPT for "a rustic street scene in Co-op City in the Bronx."
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An actual street scene in Co-op City.
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- I fooled it. Co-op City is in a part of the Bronx that is not old. There's nothing rustic about it. Or even possible. #
- Before Co-op City became a massive housing project it was an amusement park called FreedomLand. #
An unsung miracle of ChatGPT. I usually write my prompts very carefully, esp when using it to build software, but I just tried not really caring, and asking a question the way I thought of it, so it rambled a lot, was repetetive and had an error I didn't bother to correct, to see what would happen. It didn't even criticize me. It figured out what I was trying to ask/say, and gave me the answer I was looking for. Yes I am aware that all my fellow programmers taught it how to do this, though I have no idea how it does that, but it is freaking amazing. I keep finding miracles in this tech.
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- Some pragmatic notes how cross-posting works these days.#
- I use regularly: Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky. #
- Two that have APIs I can use: Mastodon and Bluesky.#
- I can't send images to Bluesky via their API, they broke the interface. My way of doing it is now called "legacy." The app that uses that feature doesn't work. But I don't even remotely have the time to go back and fix it.#
- The items in my linkblog come from this flow. If it appears in my linkblog, it also appears on Masto and Bluesky.#
- When I want broader distribution, I do this:#
- Open a new browser window.#
- Open a tab to Twitter usually. I don't know why.#
- I write some text into the Twitter tab. #
- Paste an image if there is one.#
- I open another tab for Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky. #
- I make one pass to paste the text, another to paste the image.#
- I click Send in each of the tabs, and get back to what I was doing.#
- I'm sure a lot of people are doing something very much like this. I can actually witness Jeff Jarvis doing it. I think Jay Rosen probably is too.#
- One thing that Bluesky may not be aware of is that their character limit is signficantly lower than the others, so sometimes I can't include them in this rotation. #
- I'd love to see one of these support the features of textcasting. I would give them 100 good netizen points for that, because it wouldn't be long before the others did it, and we'd have a much more complete network writing environment. #
We should all be working together as opposed to trying to find bullshit excuses not to.
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- As a boomer who marched on Washington as a high school student, who started an underground newspaper, and organized student strikes, I support today's students making their political opinions heard. I also see journalists doing what they did in the 60s and 70s, reporting on violence as if it were caused by the protestors, which wasn't true then and I'm pretty sure it isn't true now. #
- And they describe them as Palestinians, when that also is certainly not what's really going on. My guess is that 99% of them are American students, who, growing up were taught that America had great values, only to discover that America often has taken the wrong side in a war, as we are now in the war between Hamas and Israel. #
- We shouldn't have taken a side in that war, as long as Israel insists on killing massive numbers of civilians in Gaza. Yes, what Hamas did was unsupportable, and provocative, and just plain wrong, but Israel is killing far more people than Hamas did, and further, it's exactly what Israel, which pretends to represent Holocaust survivors, should not be doing, perpetrating a new Holocaust. #
- As Americans we have a responsibility to think for ourselves, and that's why I support the students. They aren't right or wrong, but they are continuing the legacy of free speech in the US, and our government and journalists are lining up against them, which to me is as tragic in the 2020s as it was in the 1970s.#
- Back when I did my first XML-based serialization format, I did it because the XML people were asking developers to do that. "Now you can create your own formats!" The theory was they had finished their work, XML was ready to go, and developers should start building on it. So I did, thinking in the back of my mind, "they don't really mean it." This was based on experience with commercial platform vendors who heavily evangelized their products when they were new, but took umbrage at the chutzpah of the developer who thought they could do anything really useful or important, don't they know that's what BigCo's do. Anyway a few years later, that's exactly what happened. Predictably, the big companies, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Sun etc thought they should define the syndication format of the future, so they set about to do it as a "standard" and thus was born Atom. My opinion, one way is better than two, and they should have jumped on the RSS bandwagon. But that's not what they do. They're still trying to make RSS unnecessary, you think they would have figured out that there's no point in trying to do that. It isn't going away. 😄#
- I wonder if anyone has thought of working with ChatGPT or Meta.ai to create a Busy Developer's Guide to ActivityPub? Here's the prompt. "I want to write a simple bridge between my writing app and any app that runs in the Fediverse, using only ActivityPub. The operations are basically those of the MetaWeblog API, create a post, update a post. Just to start. How should it handle identity? I work in Node.js." I asked both AI tools, and the Meta.ai answer was pretty useless, but ChatGPT gave what seems to be a reasonable outline for the project. #
- ActivityPub is a product of Architecture Astronauts. Start with a simple idea but generalize it too far, so it can do everything, so much so that no one understands how to do the simple stuff. You have to understand the theory before you do can anything pragmatic. It's why I said last week that they need a BDG asap, with implementations in all major runtime environments. I would help them design it, I'm a fairly typical "busy developer." I would support it if it were easier to understand, thus more likely not to be revised with breakage to apps. I've also seen this happen before, in fact it happens more often than not. If you don't understand a format, you can't actually support it. This is part of the you can't lie to a compiler axiom. #
Braintrust query: If my wordpress.com username is
scripting, where is my public profile page?
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ChatGPT is letting us customize the context in which our queries run. So I can say I use JavaScript so if I ask a programming question, it should answer in that language. I was happy to have this feature, and gave it a thumbs up. The idea is that we build up a highly detailed profile over time, so ChatGPT gets better at answering my questions. And it also locks us in. It didn't come up for me until Meta.ai came along and sometimes it's good to get a second opinion. But I want to share that profile info.
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Knicks star
OG Anunoby dunks on last season's MVP Joel Embiid.
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- Two first round questions#
- Why didn't Sixers coach Nick Nurse continue to play Buddy Hield who had the hot hand in the second and third quarters, and got the Sixers back in the game after the Knicks early dominance? He sat out most of the fourth quarter, was put back in at the very end and took the last Sixers desperation shot. #
- In the other big Eastern Division game on Thursday, why did Doc Rivers, the Milwaukee Bucks' coach go into garbage time when the Bucks were down by only 10 with 2.5 minutes remaining? What the frack was he thinking? Deficits like that are often made up, esp in elimination games? Being a good sport is one thing, but quitting the season early when you're only down by 10? What the what? I tuned in the game at the point when his stars were coming out, before the Knicks game started, and couldn't figure out why he was giving up so soon?#
- It couldn't actually happen#
- In the pause between the first and second rounds of the NBA playoffs, I am having the very very very strange thought that maybe possibly maybe the Knicks will could possibly maybe perhaps nah never hmm -- go all the way?#
Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do.
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If Google Reader had handled untitled posts more gracefully we’d be in a better place today. Their choice to require titles meant we have had a fracture, on one side — social web and on the other feed readers.
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Since I write so
much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that
the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the
Philadelphia team last night. Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the
next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc.
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BTW, there are plenty of relatively low priced
tickets available at the Pacers arena for the May 10 game when the playoff heads to Indiana. This is one of the Knicks fans' favorite tactics. Since there are so many New Yorkers, spread out all over the country, and we're pretty much all Knicks fans, this can create a demoralizing effect for the opposition players who assume their hometown crowd will be rooting for them, not the other team. It had a pretty adverse effect on the Sixers a few days ago. I was chatting about this with fellow Knicks fan
NakedJen during last night's harrowing game, and said this might be a good tactic somehow in the election, if every time the opposition had a rally they discovered that most of the attendees were actually in favor of democracy and abortion rights.
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Can we please have a nice slogan we can chant at rallies saying that we think that women owning their own bodies is at least as important as everyone being
armed to the teeth so they can shoot their dogs. I think the Repubs learned something after one of their own boasted that
she killed her own dog with a gun. They learned that Republican voters think the right to bear arms does not make them hate dogs and to their surprise
they don't endorse shooting them. Maybe shooting Jews, immigrants, people of color and libruls and libtards of all flavors would probably be okay but for crying out loud not dogs!! They're so freaking cute.
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- I've developed new appreciation for two musicians from my generation: George Harrison and Bob Dylan, thanks to the encouragement of two friends, both of whom have links to my childhood believe it or not, but who are current friends in my dotage and they're both on Facebook. #
- So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted. #
- About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.#
- Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)#
- Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most. #
I asked Meta.ai to draw a residential street in North Berkeley, CA.
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I asked
ChatGPT and
Meta.ai to draw a typical residential street in north Queens.
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- If you want a new perspective on the election, two recommendations.#
- Greg Sargent interviewed political consultant Joe Trippi, who explains why third parties could make all the difference in the election. #
- Chris Lydon interviewed Richard Slotkin about the four major stories of American politics. #
- Both very illuminating and immediately influenced my thinking.#
- TL;DR: It's gone -- you can't get there. Because it uses Twitter for identity. It and bingeworthy.io are the two apps I miss the most. #
- 1999 was a rewrite of blogging software from the point of view of both 1999 and 2016. Both timeframes. I had learned a lot inbetween, and the art of online interaction had moved forward a lot. I had become a user of Facebook, and was impressed with how their software worked. I was imploring them to turn it into a blogging system, it was achingly close. When I realized they weren't going to do it, I set out to do it myself, how I imagined Facebook would do a blogging system. Of course I didn't have their source code, so I built it from scratch. #
- Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.#
- First and foremost, you should keep a current backup copy of your subscription list. It's very easy to do. #
- In FeedLand, choose My feed list in the first menu.#
- Click on the white-on-orange XML icon, in the upper right corner of the page.#
- That will open a standard OPML version of your subscription list. This is the format that all feed reading software understands. #
- In your browser, choose the Save Page As command in the File menu (or something like that, there are lots of browsers) and save it along with your other backups.#
- You can also automate it if you can run a script that gets stuff over the internet. Once a night would be fine, not a huge burden on the server. #
- I added another way to preserve your feed list, using localStorage.#
- Every time you sign in FeedLand now saves a copy of your subscription list in localStorage. #
- And if the FeedLand server you're using should happen to disappear, if you have not taken a backup in a while, if you have a tab open, you'll at least have a copy in localStorage. #
- If you want to see it -- visit feedland.org or feedland.com, wherever you have an account, and do a hard reload. Then open the JavaScript console, and enter this line:#
console.log (localStorage.savedUserSubs)
#
- If you have questions, here's a thread.#
It's time to do whatever you were sent here to do.
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F. Murray Abraham, pictured to the right, played the part of the bad guy in a fantastic
movie about the
Inquisition. We're headed that way in the US. A man very much like
Bernardo Gui will be advising women and their doctors on what is permitted in women's health care.
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If you're a blogger, here's something to think about. Whose writing influenced the way you write? Here's my list: Kurt Vonnegut, My uncle Ken (not his writing, rather his way of telling stories), my father,
Russell Baker, Robert Hunter (lyricist for the Dead),
Douglas Coupland (specifically
MicroSerfs), the Suck.com guys, everyone who was writing at Hotwired in 1995. I'll think of others, but those are the ones who come to mind. I have been a constant reader since I was a little kid, so there's a mix of writing styles from authors I don't immediately remember. I should also do one of these lists for who inspired my software.
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My father taught me how to organize my thinking when I was trying to figure out how something works. And that's basically what I've spent my life on, figuring out how things work. The most interesting and gratifying was understanding things that didn't exist until I pieced their story together.
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I have to admit I like
Tyrese Maxey of the Sixers, who
spoiled a Knicks victory last night that would have closed out the first round of the playoffs. It felt like the Knicks had won the game when Maxie single-handedly pulled the Sixers back into contention. Now the Knicks are up 3-2 with the next game in Philadelphia tomorrow night. But! I didn't flip out this time like I did for the last game, and I think it was because I was able to watch it on
local TV with the familiar play by play guy, Mike Breen, and the best color guy for any sport,
Walt Clyde Frazier. If he wasn't flipping out why should I. One of the things I love about his
narration is that he uses words incorrectly, kind of like
Archie Bunker. I keep wanting to
say "I do not think it means what you think it means," but then I realized, last night, for the first time, it's freaking poetry! A lot of it even rhymes. And it's a poem that will go on as long as the Knicks do. Unfortunately I don't think the MSG crew is going to be doing the
next game. And btw, they do a much better job of camera work than ESPN. Maybe it's because the TV people have been able to iterate the camera setup the same way I iterate the UI of a piece of software. The same company owns the TV network as owns the arena as owns the team. It's all totally horizontally integrated. At dinner the other night a friend asked, if the
owner of the Knicks wasn't a putz. I said of course, he's the worst but, the Knicks now are being well managed. So maybe he's mellowed out a bit?
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When I log on to meta.ai,
these are the suggestions. None of them relate to things I'm thinking about. I haven't been a student or interviewed for a job in decades. But I've been on Facebook for many years, and I had to connect this to my Facebook account to use it, so presumably it knows all that Facebook knows about me, about me. How long before this is customized?
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I'm looking for a quick and easy and ideally free way to upload an MP3 of a podcast and get back a transcript. I have a feeling that a podcast I recorded yesterday will work better as a written document, but I don't have the patience to transcribe it myself. I asked on
Twitter,
Bluesky,
Mastodon,
Threads,
ChatGPT,
Meta.ai.
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The Knicks keep
winning my heart. They play the game exactly as it should be played. And they don't take the bait to make it about anything other than what happens on the court, and to trust in the league to take care of players who don't play by the rules. And
of course the Philadelphia arena was full of Knicks fans. The tickets cost a lot less than NYC tickets, and it's only 2 hours away by car, and there's good train service. If the series goes back to Philadelphia, the same thing will happen. I feel sorry for fans of small town teams, because no matter where you go in the US, there are always lots of Knicks fans. Largest city in the country.
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I keep harping on Kevin Durant, but the thing he didn't understand about New York is that we're a one-team town when it comes to basketball. We'll go to a Nets game if there's nothing else to do, but the Knicks are the story of New York in re basketball.
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If you're running a
FeedLand server, look in the
data/riverBuildLogs folder. A bunch of fairly unnecessary JSON files may be accumulating there. I made a mistake in the default value of a config setting. Details
here. I noticed the problem as feedland.org was getting low on disk space. The default is set correctly in the latest release.
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A rustic scene in Swiss mountain top village.
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Demo: I'm working on a web text editor that works in three different formats -- wizzy, markdown and html source. You can flip between them with an icon click. I love flip-switches in software.
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Today's
blogrolls are more like feed readers than the blogrolls of the 90s. My blogroll has all the best sources, and they update slowly enough that I can keep up with all of them.
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These days I'm using the moderation tools on the social web more than I did in the past. If someone I don't know posts a negative comment on Facebook, in response to something I posted, I just delete it, because they have that feature (other systems don't, they should). Any lurker who happens by is free to enjoy what I write. But if I don't know you, I honestly don't care what you think, esp if it's negative and has less than ten syllables total. It's hit and run spam for sure. I'm widening my definition of spam all the time. If you add up all the responses that actually mean anything, it doesn't amount to much. Let's see what the social web looks like without hearing from all assholes.
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I'm also blocking people who hype ActivityPub in comments to my posts about social web stuff that has nothing to do with AP. I've been down this road before. I just want to find people with
active minds, whose business is interop, who want to try stuff out. AP is not a good foundation to build on, at least until they come up with a
BDG for it. Basically it isn't a standard even though they say it is. If you want to help your cause: 1. Stop hyping. 2. Get busy with that BDG.
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I asked ChatGPT: "Could I paste in the source code of a JS package i wrote and 1. ask you to remember it and 2. ask you questions about it later?" Short version of
answer -- no.
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A use-case for ChatGPT. You get a hard-to-understand error message from MySQL, so you send the code to ChatGPT and it gives you a perfect error message, and gives you the corrected code. It also can generate SQL from an actual English language description. Quite a loop-close, since SQL was sold as programming in English, just like COBOL or AppleScript, except in ChatGPT you really are using English. It's precise English, but not "marketing" English (ie non-technical managers can be fooled by what they see). An intelligent non-programmer could actually write code, not sure of that of course since I am a programmer myself.
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I love that I can ask ChatGPT how to spell the word
exposé in a
literate way. Google is difficult about it. It tried to erase the word from my query, then gave me the wrong spelling.
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- I was pleased to read the NYT op-ed complaining that President Biden wouldn't sit for an interview.#
- I think they blew it when they ran so many stories quoting a DOJ lawyer explaining why he was not prosecuting Biden.#
- "A sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."#
- I didn't forget they did that, as I'm sure President Biden hasn't. #
- As I understand it, the proper DOJ procedure for not charging someone is to say nothing. You might write them a letter to tell them they don't need to prepare to defend themselves. Anything more than that puts your motives in question, and should get you fired as a DOJ attorney. I never saw a NYT article that even asked this question -- who is this person and why should we care what he thinks about Biden. #
- And btw, is it good journalism to raise an issue of basic competence about the sitting President of the United States without a bit more background and substance? #
- How is giving credit to such a story journalism? Sounds like trash that would run in the National Enquirer. #
- The NYT has a lot of nerve after covering that "story" so extensively, to demand that Biden sit for an interview. Can you imagine. They'd be reviewing anything but what he said. So disrespectful of our president. And so disrespectful of the Americans who elected him. If you want to raise an issue, come prepared with some journalism to back it up. That's what we expect from the NYT, not what we got from them.#
- PS: On the other hand, thanks to the NYT for posting this on their own website. The often used Medium in the past for statements like this. #
Braintrust query: I'm interested in getting an
adjustable height desk. I'd like to start with an inexpensive one, and if I like it, I'll get a real one. If I can get it via Amazon that would be best.
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I won't believe the NYT has any integrity until they let people criticize them on their op-ed page.
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Draw me a picture of El Camino Real in Menlo Park, California.
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I don't think conversation on the web has been the big benefit some people think. Do you remember when you first realized that people weren't talking to you in a response to your post, they were talking over your shoulder to the people who read your post. I guess it depends on who you are, but I don't see any value in providing a surface for spam. These days I block people without much thought if I think that's what they're doing. So, why should you design a protocol, and pay the cost of supporting, something that is a vector for spam and abuse? That's the argument in favor of using
RSS to glue things together. You can comment on my post, in your space, but my followers don't have to see it. That's up to me. I think it would change the nature of discourse, for the better.
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A
backgrounder on how the web is used for conversation, the pros and cons of each variant, and what role RSS can play in it, thanks to ChatGPT.
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When you really have federation no one needs to hype it, people don't even realize it because things just work the way you expect them to. Every time I hear "Where ever you get your podcasts," I'm reminded of how well that worked.
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ChatGPT has memory across chats. This just
popped up on the screen. I'd like to tell it that until further notice I use Node.js and do not use Express, and do use jQuery for my browser-based JavaScript, and I use the debugger all the time, so you can assume that. If this works, I now have a programming partner with memory. And maybe I can somehow get it to read all my blog posts going back 30 years? I have good archives of most of it. Also, of course I
fed this post to ChatGPT of course. So ChatGPT is not resting on its laurels. That's good. I'd really like a
Personal ChatGPT, and this is on the way to that goal.
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When I started working with Automattic last year, one of the big milestones we were aiming for was getting FeedLand and WordPress working together. Now we have
the first step. I hope you take a moment to give it a try and let us know how it works. Scripting News readers have helped bootstrap all kinds of cool stuff, we can do it again.
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Jay Gilmore: "ActivityPub breaks my brain. It doesn’t need to be that hard given the payloads we are talking about." True.
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- There's a new plugin that adds a blogroll to a WordPress site. #
- It would be helpful if people who are regular readers of Scripting News who use WordPress, set up a test site, give it a try and let us know how it goes. You can help us get to the next level with this stuff. #
- So there are two sides, the FeedLand side and the WordPress side.#
- The FeedLand side. Sign on to FeedLand, create an account if you don't have one, and subscribe to a bunch of feeds. These will be the feeds in your blogroll. There are some tips on how to find feeds, in the next section.#
- The WordPress side. There's a new plugin, developed by the people at the Team51 group at Automattic. They have a checklist for how to install the plugin in a WordPress site. #
- You can get ideas for feeds for your blogroll from reading other people's feed lists. When you see a checkbox that isn't checked, you can subscribe to the feed simply by checking the box. #
- Have a look at my feed list for ideas. Here's a list of recent users, click on their names to see their feed lists. You don't have to finish this now, you can come back and tune this up anytime.#
- Developers: Use feedlandBlogrollToolkit to add blogrolls to other platforms. #
- If you have questions or comments, or need help getting it working, post a note in the discussion group here. #
A big idea for the blogging world. I'd like to combine AI and search to make a really great search engine for bloggers. We would contribute what we know (we already do) and in return, along with everyone else, get to benefit from the collection. And when we browse,
it knows which blog we write. So it has a very good idea of what we mean when we ask a question and what we already know. This is totally missing in ChatGPT and is something Google and other search engines have never been willing to do (or even understood, I guess). But this is a huge idea. I'd like to give it
my blogroll too, so it knows which sources I consider credible. I love that it creates an incentive to post to your blog, and it makes
working together automatic.
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John Palfrey as the mover behind
Press Forward will bring the
gospel of
EZ Pass for News on his "ongoing whistle-stop tour" of local news orgs. JP was my boss/rabbi when I was at Berkman, and is why we got so much done there. He ran air cover for what we did, the BloggerCons, giving RSS a home, podcasting, blogs for everyone, the people and democracy. Now he's doing it for the local news business.
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EZ Pass for News is formula for functional relationships between local news pubs and people in far away places (ie not their locality) who may from time to time want to read an article or a series of articles on their site, and pay per-issue instead of buying a subscription.
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I was chatting with a friend who went to
Bronx Science, as I did, and we were talking about Isaac Asimov, and I said I thought he went to Science too. So I fired up ChatGPT and asked if Asimov went to Science, and
it said yes. Then I asked where he went to high school and it said Bronx Science. But by then I was pretty sure he didn't, so I went to Google and meta.ai, and neither knew where he went to high school. So I asked on Twitter, Mastodon,
Blue Sky and Threads. Not sure why I even care! Oh well.
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I don't have time to write about it now but the end of last night's Knicks game was one of the
most dramatic bits of NY sports ever. I would like to
thank Kevin Durant for saying the Knicks weren't cool. It's somewhat like the
Streisand Effect where the thing KD was trying to hide was that
he was no longer cool. Classic
projection. Obviously he was not the hot shit he thought he was in 2019.
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The "largest open publishing network in the world" is the web.
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The idea of us all
working together to federate is the right idea, but making ActivityPub the hurdle everyone has to jump over is imho the wrong idea. I'm building on feeds -- RSS, Atom, RDF. A lot of good stuff works on that basis. And it's a much shorter path to
interop than ActivityPub.
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I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on
Jay’s recommendation I might pay $1 on my
EZ Pass for News to read
this story, esp since I saw the
Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a week or two, given that the Knicks are playing their NBA team right now in the first round of the playoffs. I really want to know everything there is to know about this faceoff. See, I want to pay for journalism here, but journalism hasn't been willing to sell it to me, at any price. They've never gotten the basic truth of: "The customer is always right." Really important point and true in every way.
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Over the weekend I
tested the
blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs-writing we'll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you're a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you'll be able to try it out pretty soon.
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Jeff Jarvis
writes that a German man who died with 70K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was
my great-uncle, my grandmother's brother.
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Good morning sports fans!
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Back in the old days, during a great sport event, we'd post our feelings, pro or con, to Twitter. I
observed as follows: "Let's do something great with our lives! In the meantime I miss the role that twitter used to play and never will play again. It was the place to go to say 'How about those Knicks!' when they win a game like the one they won last night. Not no mo."
Betsy Devine was the first to like this. I felt heard.
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Doc asks the
question on all our minds: "Why does ChatGPT misspell the f*ck out of words on images?" Don Park, Wes Felter and JY Stervinou chime in.
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It's totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are
orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over 1 million Americans who did not have to die imho, because our government was not only immoral and hugely corrupt, but also made no attempt to govern. I am a child of Holocaust survivors and an American born in the USA, and am proud of and grateful to my country. Any American is free to protest the actions of our government or any other government, or really anything. If you don't believe in that then you aren't actually trying to make America great, you're saying something altogether different and incompatible. I am American. I am also deeply offended at other Americans who propose to speak for me. That actually is antisemitic, btw.
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Quick
video demo of
meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it
on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future.
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- More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for. #
- Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the technical language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I have that working here, and have been building on it.#
- I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works. #
- I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell, not necessarily all at once, but possibly in a series, over time. #
- I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together. #
- Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first). #
A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for
Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.
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