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.
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Wouldn't it be incredible to have ChatGPT as part of a conversation on GitHub?
#
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.
#
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.
#
- We hear about what the companies are doing, mostly very serious bullshit. However, as always the most interesting stuff is done by the users, especially at such an early stage in a technology. #
- In the past, when blogging was booting up, we had blogging itself to share information about what we were learning. #
- Podcasting grew even more quickly because we already had blogging to share info on what we were trying, what worked, and what didn't. #
- You can see all of it in the archive of Scripting News. I was liberal about what I pointed to, because sharing the ideas was more important than any one person's ideas, including my own. The downside is that it made it easy for people to claim credit for things they didn't contribute. #
- Anyway with AI, I'm just using the stuff, not developing with it, at least not yet. I wouldn't know where to begin. But I'm discovering all kinds of applications every day, and writing about them on my blog, but I know there are many others doing the same, and I want to read all of it and want them to read my stuff. There's no way to find each other right now.#
- Sidebar: It would be interesting to have an AI server that was ingesting our RSS feeds all the time. Then a community of bloggers, if it should develop would have a totally unique kind of archive. Who knows what we'd learn? Would anyone need to write a book about this stuff, or would we always have a current book about what's been discovered here? If you find this fascinating as I do, then I want to know more about what you're doing. See how we can bootstrap something in itself, that's the best way to do it.#
- In the meantime, when I discover a blogger who is writing about using AI, I'll add it to my blogroll, which is visible on the blogroll.social main page, and on my blog. If you have such a blog, or know of a good one, send me a link, and I'll add it to the blogroll. Once there are enough, I'll start a public timeline for it in FeedLand, so everyone can benefit. #
- Let's use our technology to track the most exciting tech development in a long time. #
- I'm writing about AI and users today, and I wanted a Scarlett Johansson image to go in the right margin and that led me to this product on Amazon.#
- It's a 1/6 scale plastic version of SJ's head. There are a few versions, some bigger, different color hair, etc. #
- They have 1/6 scale female bodies that you can put SJ's head on.#
- A whole industry apparently has formed around her head and body.#
Plastic rendering of Scarlett Johansson's head, 1/6 size, $30.
#
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.
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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.
#
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.
#
- Here's what I've learned from owing a Tesla Model Y with Full Self Driving. I don't believe it's safe. It absolutely does require your full attention at all times. You are still driving the car. I've seen it do crazy stuff in simple situations. I've seen it panic, basically throw its hands in the air and say Dave this is your problem. That's why you always have to be ready, as if you were driving the car yourself because at any moment you could be. You never know when it's going to happen. Now focus on that moment. Your car has given up and turned the driving over to you. How much experience do you have with that? Do you know where to look? Do you hit the brakes or veer to the left or right? If you're an experienced driver, a lot of these reactions are completely programmed into the lower levels of the brain. You don't have to think at all. When the car panics, I tend to panic. If I had 10 or 20 years experience with this connection, then I guess it's probably safe. But not the way it is. #
- I'm amazed there aren't more terrible accidents with FSD, and that Tesla still promotes this as "self-driving," which it is not. #
- Also, I love my Tesla. Every time I get into that mofo I feel privileged. It looks like a Toyota Camry but drives like a muscle car. I might still switch to a Kia EV9, at some point, if it drives as well as the Tesla, simply because the nearest Telsa dealer is over an hour away, and the Kia dealer is in Kingston which is practically in the neighborhood. #
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.
#
- Here's something you may find funny if you study the evolution of software technology.#
- In the 80s there were all kinds of ideas about how to do hypertext. Mostly they called for two-way links, so you could walk the graph in any direction you like. These were hard to implement and required the two parties work with each other, and that never happened. #
- In the early 90s along comes Tim Berners-Lee, a random NextStep developer who wanted to play and he for whatever reason didn't wait to figure out how to boil the ocean with two-way links, he just did one-way links and instead of inventing a new protocol he just implemented it on top of TCP/IP. While the purists were debating its purity it took off, broke all records, made a lot of people very rich.#
- A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee, the same guy who made the web, wants to layer a new protocol on top of the web -- the Semantic Web. He wanted people to be able to query the web the way you query a database. "show me all the widgets on sale in urbana for less than $20." Like that.#
- It never happened for the same reason the two-way hyperlinks didn't, it required cooperation. You couldn't just throw together a demo in an afternoon as a fun side project like you could with the web (I speak from experience, my first success with the web took five freaking minutes). #
- Now when Google or some other browser maker integrates ChatGPT-like functionality in their browser, as a side-effect, you will get TBL's Semantic Web. It won't require any cooperation and that's why it will work.#
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.
#
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.
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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.
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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.
#
- TL;DR: For the 80,000th time -- the Knicks suck!#
- All the funny farting didn't make a difference last night. The Knicks were blown out, again (sigh), by the Indiana team. My dear friend NakedJen texted me from Oklahoma of all places (I don't know how she got there, or why, she must be on her way to some other place, maybe Dallas?) that the Knicks are trying to kill her. Sums it up perfectly. I gave myself leave after the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, seeing where this thing was going. I went to bed, and knew that when I woke up there would be a Game 7 at the Garden on Sunday (3:30PM Eastern). I'm not sure how I feel about that. #
- The odds are probably pretty good that the Knicks will win that game, but maybe they should just let it go, and we can pick this up again in October. By then all the injured players should be back, and maybe there will be an incredible new free agent signed over the summer, so we're not so dependent on one superstar, who is great, but has off nights, like last night. Why didn't he let any other Knicks try to fill in for him, when he's double teamed that means someone is open. I was screaming at the TV during the game, let someone someone else shoot dammit! Oh my gods. I hate game 7's when my team is in the game. I don't mind it if other people's teams are in a death match like that. #
- Oh well. Here we go.#
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.
#
- It's overwhelming how much ground Google has to cover to get AI into all their products, but that's what they think they have to do, and I more or less agree. They feel they have to because their main product, search, is threatened by ChatGPT. #
- Clayton Christensen called this The Innovator's Dilemma in a book published in 1997. It's why Netscape was able to undermine Microsoft when the web came out. Microsoft had a huge beast they had to move, Windows, and all its apps, and while they had a hardcore, scrappy and rich culture, they couldn't overcome the inertia that comes from being dug in, with their cannons pointed at the already-vanquished IBM, not the upstarts that came from the VCs in Silicon Valley. #
- Microsoft and the rest of the PC industry had written off Unix, but there it was, again -- ugly as ever, but with networking that really worked and was easy, and the users wanted networking even though Microsoft wanted them to want Office. #
- Google did the same with AI. As did Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. They had AI projects, and used AI in limited areas, as did Microsoft with Unix in the early 90s. But they couldn't bet everyting on it like a startup can. Now they have to. But the they don't have the tools needed to fight the new war. That's the dilemma. #
- This is the toughest corner any tech company has to turn, but there is an approach that could work for Google. Their strength is distribution. They have all the users. They can take a product that's ready for the world to market in a day. But they can't develop it. You can't snap your fingers and have a good new UI for every one of their products, ready in a year, although they will try as MS tried to adapt Office to the web. They don't have the right people or corporate culture to do that. Instead you have to hope you can find a great bootstrapping startup outside to work with, and use their strength as a distributor to help them. This is what I recommended for Microsoft in the 1990s, and I think I was vindicated, it would have imho worked a lot better than the path they chose. #
- But now, their third time around this loop, Microsoft has learned! With their OpenAI partnership they've done exactly what I recommended in the 90s. They still have to convert all the old software and their user interfaces around the new capabilities, but at least they also own a share of a bootstrap that's now booming.#
- PS: I am blessed to have lived long enough now to have been part of now six different rearrangements like this. I love that we have now gotten there again. There's absolutely no doubt now, imho. The six rearrangements -- minis, PCs, GUIs, web, Napster, and now AI.#
- PPS: This is all my opinion, and from the polls I did yesterday, it's obvious that many of the people within earshot don't agree or have seen the light yet. #
- Dave to ChatGPT: I just read a news story that the Knicks won the last game in the playoffs because of an epic fart in the locker room. Can you draw a light-hearted illustration of that event?#
Version 1
#
- Then I asked for a serious and dramatic illustration.#
Version 2
#
- I imagine you can bet on who the farter was. #
- My guess would be Hartenstein. #
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.
#
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.
#
Knicks at the Garden via ChatGPT 4o.
#
- They needed fresh blood, and they got it. #
- Knicks won in a blowout. #
- I had no idea that was coming. #
- Next game on Friday.#
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.
#
Jalen Brunson, Knicks star, after having his ass kicked in Sunday's game.
#
- 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.
#
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.
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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.
#
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."
#
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.
#
- 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.
#
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."
#
- 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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."
#
An actual street scene in Co-op City.
#
- 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.
#
- 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.
#
- 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?
#
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.
#
Knicks star
OG Anunoby dunks on last season's MVP Joel Embiid.
#
- 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
- 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.
#