Is
this the
user experience writers want from WordPress? If I were designing it, I would start from scratch, build an easy writing tool for writers to focus on writing, and make the design process accessible if they want to work in that mode, but keep it out of their way because most writing has nothing to do with design.
#
Meanwhile the Repubs are getting ahead of themselves. Bannon said
something that he should be arrested for. I'm sure it's horribly illegal to threaten people the way he did, and he did it in public.
#
I caught a bit of the last
Wheel of Fortune. The three players were celebs: Vanna White, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik. What was remarkable was how super-human Jennings is. He could solve the puzzle with almost no information. I have no clue how he saw the patterns. He has freakish intelligence.
#
Someone should tell the kids the Repubs will come for their weed. Just sayin. There probably are a number of voting age youngsters who have never lived in a time and place when cannabis was illegal.
#
By popular demand -- my blogroll now makes it more clear that the permalink to each item is the date of the item.
Screen shot. This is a convention in blogs and social media apps that the timestamp doubles as a permalink. And I think this is more distracting, and cluttered, but let's give it a try. It's possible that people missed that they could go to the website from the blogroll. Now it should be more obvious.
#
The Repubs are coming uncloaked. Their slogan might as well be Revenge. It's the one thing everyone who votes for Trump wants more than anything. They hate their lives, and are looking for someone to release their rage on. They don't know how else to do it. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement. Ask a billionaire if you don't believe me. They have huge grievances which you would have thought all that wealth would have cured them of. The new Nazis have a selling proposition that works every few generations, after the memory of the previous societal explosion are gone. My parents, the last people I knew who lived through the Nazis are gone. I just have the memory of the aftermath, and it wasn't pretty. βAll of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.β We're at the beginning of the "happen again" moment. My grandfather told me what to do, but I won't do it, pretty sure of that.
#
- It's been driving me crazy watching Stan Krute doing all these weird and often beautifully bizarre ChatGPT images, and realizing they are only being seen by people on Facebook when there's this huge world of creative people that don't or won't use FB.#
- Then it occurred to me, I have the perfect place for these images, outside the facebookiverse, that would showcase them, and be easy to produce (I don't want to take on responsibility for big production overhead myself).#
- I have images I put in the right margin of blog posts on Scripting News. Small little bits of creative color, that may or may not be connected to the story they are next to. And sometimes connected in non-obvious ways, intended to make you think.#
- Then NakedJen sent me a recent picture of herself that's perfect for the right margin. Seen in the right margin of this post.#
- Here's a page where you can scroll through the collection of images I can choose from. I'd love to add more creative stuff here. And I'd love to get some of Stan Krute's genius or Brad Pettit or whoever else might be so inspired. #
- No promises about when or if they'd be used. You can post them here, as comments on this message if you like. #
- I may have to restrict this to people I follow, just letting you know, based on past experience. #
Greetings from the Catskills where it's a bright early summer day.
#
Podcast: Why the mechanism behind ChatGPT doesn't matter. As usual I ramble all over the place, but hopefully this illuminates and perhaps entertains. 15 minutes.
#
The real story of RSS is that in a moment when the NYT had a spirit of adventure, they backed RSS and as a result news adopted a technology that was pioneered by bloggers, not the tech industry. If that partnership had flourished and developed we might now have a good alternative to the tech billionaires.
#
And before that a few oddly empowered crazy-ass people at Netscape had an idea that bloggers had the answer, not Google. I don't really know who they were, they communicated through their actions, not via email or the phone. Same kind of thing happened with XML-RPC, except there I knew the people at Microsoft who momentarily bent the corporate rules to make something happen quickly and simply in the market.
#
Spoiler: The tech industry eventually had their way. As a friend from Microsoft who is now gone liked to say: too bad so sad.
π#
I have to carve out time to get
Bingeworthy working again. I miss it.
#
I have a Mac Mini that keeps running out of space on its internal drive. It happened again, but this time it offered to open an app that helps me find the big stuff. I don't know when this app came to be, but it's very helpful. In a few minutes I was able to free up 100GB of space used for all kinds of frivolous purposes, like backups of every mobile device that's ever come within wifi distance of this machine (or so it seems). I'm sure there's a way to get it to store some of the frivolous stuff on the 16TB external drive, but I sure don't know how to do it nor do I want to know. My head is so overloaded with other BS from JavaScript, CSS, Node.js, my own software, etc etc. My brain has been out of space a lot longer than this Mac's has. I desperately want to move my act to Linux and reclaim all the memory I'm using to store stuff about the Mac, which isn't really doing me much good, I use the Mac as if it was a Linux machine. However, I remain a happy shareholder, that's my revenge, and why I bought the stock in the first place. I was so unhappy with what Apple was doing at the time (1998) but I could see that it would make
beaucoups money, so I hedged. I figured at least they'd make me rich while completely annihilating all I had done to make the platform great. My inner greedy capitalist has his revenge. I would still rather have seen Apple keep
Frontier running and have lost some of the profit I made from the Apple stock. Anyway, as usual I ramble.
π#
- I started replying to a post by Tim Bray in a thread on Mastodon, but quickly hit the character limit, so I moved my act over here. #
- ChatGPT gets rid of a huge problem with Wikipedia. #
- It often only represents a story from one point of view.#
- So the story of the Mac is a story of Apple, not the developers.#
- Same with the story of RSS. I'm sure you know the story they tell, but there's a whole other story, about how Netscape and blogging got together with Salon, Wired, Red Herring and Motley Fool, and eventually brought the NYT and NPR on board, and that created a powerful standard supported by the entire publishing industry, that led to social media and podcasting. It really has very little do with the attempts of the tech industry to undermine it, other than their attempts failed to do that, yet if you read the Wikipedia page you'd get the idea that the bigco's heroically fought back against what exactly it's not clear. #
- I can't contribute to that page, based on the rules of Wikipedia, so your idea that I could just work harder to get the story right, well it's not ethical for me to do that. The best I can do is write about it on my blog (as I'm doing now) and hope that someone goes in there and fights with whoever is in charge of keeping the story as it is. (Although Tim, not you, it would be unethical for you too.)#
- Wikipedia also has served as a way for people to take credit for things other people did. Notoriously, Ben Hammersley claiming he chose the name for podcasting, for which there is absolutely no support. If ChatGPT made a mistake like that people would be howling. I'm sure Wikipedia is filled with junk like that. Why wouldn't it be. #
- And btw, I still point to Wikipedia pages from my blog posts over all other sources, because it has the potential of getting better, while other sources don't. #
- But ChatGPT is Wikipedia plus everything else and it has software far in advance of search engines for uncovering alternate angles. #
- ChatGPT gets all angles of a story, if they have been covered on the open web. I don't know why it's better at finding stuff, and also understanding my queries even though they're not rigorously specified, my understanding of the technology is nil, but as a user, I love the way I can explore history, and get a lot more than just the result of a weird culture that you have to spend years politicing through to be able to contribute. ChatGPT has managed to route around that outage.#
- It's also an amazing programming partner, and I imagine that it would work just as well for visual artists if they used it to try out prototypes of ideas, esp if new ways of training it are explored, which of course they are being. #
- Having known each other for 20+ years, I suppose that's a big difference between us, you seek out those kinds of political frays, I get very impatient with them and move on. #
- Also, I'm not here to debate. I don't like online debates. π#
According to reviewers
Hit Man is a movie for adults, supposedly with a plot, writing, acting, from Netflix. Rated 83 on Metacritic (a must-see). I was excited! Watched it. It's like a TV sitcom. Ugh.
Zzzzz. The main character has a nice-Brad Pitt like smile. Wears weird constumes. Finds a beautiful girlfriend. Best thing about it is that it takes place in New Orleans, so I could try to figure out where they were. That's about it. Much better implementation of a similar idea --
Emily the Criminal.
#
I bet you could do a nice AI that would create a graph of people who are connected to other people through far more criteria than networks like LinkedIn or Facebook could. It could take into account all of those connections and others. Kind of like a current-day geneology of relationships.
#
I find I look for new stuff in the social web the way I used to look for new stuff on news websites before we got RSS and feed readers. It made a little sense when it was only Twitter. But now I have to check Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads too. It's not just the writing that has to be distributed manually, but also our time as readers. And then there's the question of where you reply if you have something to add.
#
If you and I both have accounts on ChatGPT, it would be nice if I could include you in one of my conversations with the bot, and we could explore an idea together with access to all the information we might want to call up. This is what all the chat companies are trying, but the one in the best position to do this is OpenAI, because they have the top rung in the
positioning ladder for AI apps. It's where most of us go for our AI. Like Visicalc which had the top rung of the spreadsheet ladder until Lotus 1-2-3 took over, which was then knocked off the top rung by Excel. This is why they have to move forward aggressively, it's the way tech works. Before too long all the chat apps with have their AI bots in the loop and it will be too late for OpenAI to dominate. But right now they are the obvious choice for this. The place
you we go to AI.
#
I wonder if reporters know that Wikipedia hallucinates too?? And since they so often consider Wikipedia authoritative, that means reporters and their publications hallucinate as well.
#
More bad financial advice: "Give money to Trump! He needs your help! They're out to get him! You're next!"
#
I used the ChatGPT "upload an image" feature today while debugging some software. I could show it what wasn't working with a screen shot. Amazingly it understood and made the connection to the software we were working on, and suggested a modification that made it work properly. This was an important missing bit of functionality, previously you had to explain in words what wasn't working visually. That worked too, but was cumbersome. Much easier to just show it was wrong. And the UI couldn't be simpler. Take the screen shot at paste it into the box where you normally type. It starts analyzing before you press Enter.
#
Greeting cards. π
#
We could bridge RSS and ActivityPub and get more interop.
#
Jon Stewart from this Monday is
good to watch as a reminder of what the press could be doing beyond what Jay Rosen recommends (which is on the right track). They could be playing the same role that the 12 jurors in NYC did. I'd love to see a requirement that every moderator of a major news show in the US do jury duty for a couple of weeks a year, to keep them aware of the standard that should also apply to news, not just justice. (Update:
Jay is on it.)
#
It's amazing how well
Comey's rep has been laundered, but I'll never forget that his CYA move re
Hillary's emails at the very end of the 2016 campaign, knocked Hillary off her feet, she never recovered and we had four years of Trump and maybe more as a result. He is not an authority on democracy, he's one of the early pariahs. There has been no apology, or regret expressed. As bad as Alito. I wonder if CNN has bothered to check how people feel about him.
#
If podcasting had a marketing team behind it, we'd run a campaign that says "It's not podcasting if you don't have choice." If you have to use Apple, Audible, Spotify or Google to listen to something, that's nice, hope it's good for you, but folks that is not a podcast. Podcasts give you the listener all the power. If you give it up it'll all be Disneyfied before too long. It pisses me off that Amazon Music sends me messages about all the new "podcasts" they have. I mutter under my breath when I hear this, some expletive I'd rather not repeat. Amazon, the users know that podcasting == user choice, and they hate you just a little every time you lie about it. Find another term you like and use that. You have the money to do the marketing. Come on, just once play fair. You'll be surprised how good it feels, and I wouldn't be surprised if the users reward you for it.
#
What got me spinning was listening to Rachel Maddow advertise her podcast at the beginning of her show last night. You can get the podcast for free, she says, or if you want no ads, you can pay some money and get it from Apple. What Apple is selling there, and Maddow is going along with, is not a freaking podcast and by calling it one they undermine a great medium. I understand why Maddow might not care, she makes millions from a medium that doesn't give users much choice (ie MSNBC) so why should she care about podcasting, which does.
#
The test for whether it's a podcast or not is if they say you can get it "Wherever you get your podcasts." If they can say that, it's a podcast. If you have to get it from Apple or YouTube or whoever, it's not a podcast. That's the rule.
#
Itβs too bad when I post something
positive about ChatGPT, which I do because journalists are dumping on it based on not using it but asking it
gotcha questions, which seems to be all they know how to do, the trolls show up, asking if weβve read this or that journalism article. On
Facebook, I delete the comments and change the permissions to only allow friends to comment.
The journalists are wrong about ChatGPT. I solve problems with it. It guides me through difficult programming situations, esp around convoluted designs like CSS and JavaScript. It knows all of it. The only times it hallucinates (and I know it's doing it btw, I'm not stupid) is when there is not enough info on the web to give an answer. It would be nice if it just said "I don't know" but it's early, and they haven't figured out how to do that yet. The journalists have no sense of wonder I guess, or they never thought to use it in their jobs. I can't wait for the first aha! from a journalist -- who will say this: "Aha! Now I see what this is for and it's freaking lovely." But they've decided it sucks and that's that. Too bad, we're going on without them. And thanks to the good moderation tools we can keep the turd-droppers from totally screwing it up.
#
In other words the designers of CSS and JavaScript and probably every other technology everyone uses had no idea what actual developers were doing with their committee-designed creation. They made mistakes and piled them on each other, fixing old mistakes with new mistakes. After 30 years of evolving in this convoluted way, if you want to create useful software, you have to either master all of it (and no one has) or pay $20 a month to OpenAI so you can use it to navigate the awful hairball that the web platform has become. Where we only have a sliver of knowledge as humans,
the machine knows all of it. And that's just programming. I'm just guessing that everything is that way. You know the
part in The Matrix Reloaded where we're told
no one knows how the technology works. That's where we are now. Spend your whole life using the stuff and you still only know a tiny fraction of what you need to make good software. We needed what ChatGPT does, but we didn't know we needed it. That's where we are now, and the journos are sitting on the sidelines hurling
spitballs at it.
#
- Keith Olbermann makes a good point in today's podcast. #
- Instead of "Donald Trump" we should always say "Convicted felon Donald Trump."#
- It's branding and it works. He's right. #
Convicted felon Donald Trump.
#
- I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of an interviewer hallucinating during a news show with several distinguished panelists discussing an important issue.#
You don't have to trick ChatGPT into hallucinating. Just ask it to.
π#
It's been almost nine years since I did the
podcast about podcasting. Today I was asked how I feel about podcasting now. Here's what I said. It's still working -- people expect to have choice in where they listen to their podcasts, and as long as that's true they will imho continue to have choice. But even if Google took it over tomorrow, I'd be happy with the outcome. It's been over 20 years since we rolled it out, and it's still delivering huge value to lots of people, and isn't controlled by anyone, as far as I can tell there are no gatekeepers. If only we had been able to keep blogging free of that kind of control, but I have hope there too.
#
One of the flaws in the design of Teslas is they are really difficult to operate safely for people who are farsighted, such as myself. A lot of the
status messages are too small for me to read without reading glasses, and in the time it takes to put them on the message is gone. Esp frustrating for the messages that tell you to do this or that to keep using FSD. And when I'm flipping the glasses down, my eyes are not on the road Mr or Ms Tesla. This is a design problem. Maybe you should use voice prompts for this kind of stuff. Or use a camera to see if my hands are on the wheel.
#
We should apply mathematics to language design. The goal of the language should be maximum simplicity for the human developer. As much of the complexity as possible should be handled by software, either at compile-time or runtime. It should strive to read like
pseudocode. We started out writing code by toggling switches on the front panel of the computer, and for a few decades we were factoring and making it simpler with every iteration, but then we turned around in the other direction. I am from the church of factoring. I do it in my designs of products at all levels, and I treat languages with the same care. It turns out all the rules of working on open systems also apply to language design. I plan to write more about this.
#
Another great application for ChatGPT. Try to find a blog post or article about the design of a language that gets to what you want to know without wading through a lot of stuff you don't care about. I got it to explain Swift, Go and Rust quickly. Okay now I know what they're doing. It would have taken me days to assemble this, and I never have that kind of time for such execursions.
#
I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and
isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.
#
If you make a podcast client, I'd like to have an
OPML list of all the feeds I'm subscribed to in my client so I can follow it in my feed reader. I'd really like it to go the other way, actually, so I could maintain the list on my desktop computer, and have it automatically reflected in the mobile podcast client. It's very important that it use OPML, that's the standard for this stuff. I couldn't possibly get excited by another format. Podcasting thrives on these standards. The client I use is
Pocket Casts which is part of Automattic. BTW, you can
use Drummer to edit a subscription list. Its native format is OPML.
#
To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. If I wanted my calculator to give me incorrect results I could press the wrong keys. In other words, ChatGPT is a very new tool. It can be hard to control, you have to check what it says, and try different questions. But the result, if you pay attention and don't drive it under the wheels of a bus, is that you can do things you never could do before.
#
Walt Mossberg shows why ChatGPT is such a conversation-starter, and thus is incredible art. He asked it to draw a picture of himself with Kara Swisher. Of course everyone did that, and posted the result to the thread. The variety of responses is amazing, revealing of what I'm not sure. Here's
the one it came up with for me.
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I bet you could do a beautifully readable blog by just dynamically rendering its RSS feed. Why bother statically rendering the home page, month page, day page or pages for each individual post. Dynamic servers are so cheap these days.
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The worst part about having a felon in the White House is that he's probably committing felonies while he's in the freaking White House.
#
There's a lot of stuff in Friday's piece. Ken Smith pointed out the story in the
very last postscript. Before that, I hadn't put it together that podcasting worked because for a while Adam did my job, and for a while I did his. That guaranteed two things -- that the technology would be maximally simple, and that anyone with a computer could do the whole recording and production job without help from an expensive studio. In both cases the result was nowhere near commercial standards, but that didn't matter, in fact it helped that there were so many glitches in my early podcasts, that said that hey if this guy can do it, so can I.
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By my calculations this is the 365th consecutive month of publication for my humble blog. Are there any longer-running blogs in the world?
#
The outline for May 2024 has been
safely tucked away for posterity on the Scripting News repo.
#
The last post for last month is one you should read if you read nothing else on this blog ever. It's the story of tech. Something new and explosive comes out, and the journalists feel threatened by it (always, in every way, even when it has nothing to do with them) and a few others (music industry with Napster, artists with ChatGPT) see amateurs invading their previously exclusive space. Truth is these new technologies give new tools for expression of ordinary untrained people. Now we get to have fun with sharing what we see, and maybe the professionals have to reorient themselves to the rest of the world. One thing you can't do and hope not to be left behind, is ignore the new tech, if you want to understand, don't depend on what you read in the news orgs, because they are always full of shit about new tech. You have to go discover it for yourself. And when someone says they're blown away by the new stuff they can do, listen to them, don't argue, try to understand. There's a lot of growth locked up in understanding. So please read the piece, we're at one of those points now wrt to ChatGPT. Sure, it knows a lot of stuff, that's great, but there's also it's ability to listen and understand us. This is what's really new here.
#
Sometimes the On This Day feature in Facebook surfaces some questions that should be asked regularly. For example. 1. I asked
in 2023 what do librarians think of ChatGPT. Only one response. Maybe more this year. If there are any librarians blogging about their experiences with ChatGPT, please send me a link and I will add them to my AI category. If
anyone is writing about new discoveries they've made, I want to hear about it.
#
- I try not to post pictures of Trump on this blog since he left office in 2021, but this is too good not to share. #
Pretty sure this is a meme, not an actual New Yorker cover.
#
Microsoft and Google are putting AI chat into all their apps everywhere you can enter text, which imho is as pointless as embedding web browsers in all of the Office apps in 1994. ChatGPT is the Netscape of this generation. Compete with that, create the best environment for the kind of work we do there. Thatβs the game, from a UI standpoint.
#
Perhaps I should add a new element to the
source namespace, the name of the author of a blog, if the feed is for a blog. Here's why I need it. I am building my blogroll. Every time I find an insightful story about using tech I use, these days esp AI, I add it to my blogroll so I get to see any new articles they write when they post. But if their blog has a catchy name, I'll never pick it out of the list as I scan for something new to read. I need the name of the author too. Basically a blogger should provide their name, but of course it's completely optional. I'll subscribe anyway, if the article is on-topic. I'm soaking this stuff up now, building my own personal firehose.
#
A
screen shot that illustrates. If you're going to put your name in the title, put it in the first part.
#
- Once again we're at the beginning of a huge tech-induced transformation, and yet again the people who already occupy a high rung of the ladder of success, or imagine they do, are pissing all over it, without using it.#
- I remember kvelling about Napster, about how the ability to program my own music had made it possible for me to explore my own life in new ways, because music is inexorably bound to memory. For me the big revelation came on Father's Day in 2000 when I heard Father and Son by Cat Stevens on the radio and desperately wanted to hear it again. #
- I had tried Napster a few months earlier and found that it had none of my music. It was basically just a technology demo. I tried it again, and this time not only did it have the Cat Stevens song, but it had every song from my childhood that I hadn't heard since being a kid listening to WABC on the transistor radio my grandfather gave me for my birthday when I was five or six years old.#
- I told this story at a Future of Music conference and was torn apart by the other people on stage, supposedly creative people, who cared not one bit about how people used the product they created, and the power of being able to program our own music. They were the bosses of music and my job was merely to give them money and admiration and stfu. They tried to get me off the stage (I was the moderator) but I stood my ground and of course never forgot.#
- It happened again a few years later at the DNC in Boston, when the journalists mocked the bloggers because we had no experience as journalists, and they didn't like the way we dressed (they wrote articles about it, in the NYT even). 20+ years later they're still complaining, but they forget to blame us for their misery, now. Their misery is they forget the glory of their job, which is empowering us -- their users -- to change the world that so desperately needs changing. #
- It's happening again with AI, which is opening up creative expression to people who can't draw, or aren't good writers, or people who want to be better programmers, or who knows -- this technology is the most powerful I've used in my long life in tech. #
- The difference is -- you have to use something before your criticism makes any sense. That was the mistake the music industry made with Napster. What the journalists made regarding bloggers (we're they're sources, tried to say over and over but they don't listen they just like to talk and be admired and our job as usual is to give them money and stfu). #
- My very good friend Doc Searls sees it the same way. He calls it People's AI. We're going to build this out the way we did it with blogging and podcasting a few years ago. It may be our last rodeo, we're getting on in years, but I'm so glad I lived to see this.#
- (Sidebar: The people who run tech companies today have no idea how to build new technology markets, the categories they occupy were built by others, now gone. I finally figured that's our disconnect and why products lose important features when they are taken over by the inheritors, and why the leaders of Google et al have no idea where to put AI for users to build with it, or even that the users build the stuff they use in tech. Say what you want about Jack, Ev and Biz, but they understood this idea and they did let the users lead.)#
- And btw, don't miss that it was twelve of us, twelve people, that finally said what the ladder-occupiers have failed to say for far too long about Trump -- he's a felon. We've known that, but when did Obama, Biden, Moscow Mitch or anyone else with a name or reputation to protect say the most obvious truth. They're all powerless and weak, and if we want to get out of this mess we're going to have to lead ourselves. Waiting for them, that didn't work. #
- PS: Thanks to Twitter for increasing the character limit, so I can write my blog posts on my iPad before starting my day. Like this. ;-)#
- PPS: BTW -- here's the song. Somehow the music industry survived my ability to share this song with you and my future self.#
- PPPS: I write these pieces with specific people in mind but I rarely say who they are because it embarrasses them. But I write all my pieces the my regular readers, who keep me going, almost 30 years (on Oct 10 this year). I hope they build great things with these ideas, and they let me help them do it. #
- PPPPS: Doc tends to write brilliant pieces that perfectly describe these points in time. Let's travel back to 1997, as Steve Jobs is returning to Apple, when Doc explained that while he loves me, Steve loves no one but Steve. π#
- PPPPPS: The motto for the podcasting community as it was booting up in 2004 was "users and developers party together." That was the thing that Adam and I agreed on. Adam being the user, and I being the developer. Of course it was his trying to be a developer, and me trying to be a user that was the spark that created the boom. We both made it safe for amateurs to do what we do. That's why podcasting, unlike the music industry, never went to war with its users. π₯#
On the day I wrote a
piece asking why Trump isn't in jail, the jury returns a
34 guilty verdicts in his Manhattan trial. It's the people that get this stuff right. Juries are
wonderful.
#
BTW, I've noticed that Google often doesn't link to the Wikipedia page unless you specifically ask for it. I don't like that. I think it should always be at the top.
#
The best humor is about other people being stupid, evil, clumsy or their misfortune. Watch a SNL skit. It's not about people being smart or brave, kind, generous or otherwise wonderful. That's another kind of entertainment. We find the misfortune of others funny. Especially famous, successful people. Why? I have no idea.
#
- Biden would be a fine president if our problems were limited to the virus, the economy and climate change. #
- He's like Obama, but with much more experience at getting things done in Washington. #
- His failure is that the fascist movement in the country is much stronger now than it was when he took office. #
- Are we better off than we were four years ago? No, sadly we are worse off. Trump is a much bigger threat now.#
- Biden is a fine LBJ-like president. And like LBJ, he has his Vietnam. Biden's war he can't end is called Trump. Trump isn't in jail. That's the failure right there. #
- The problem could be fixed if we had this discussion out in the open, so that the press raises it every day and in every press event. They shouldn't be trying to embarrass him about his age, that's rude and deceptive, instead they should ask why isn't Trump in jail?#
- If Biden wanted to address this, and it would certainly help his chances of winning, he would:#
- Fire Garland immediately.#
- Apologize for not firing him sooner. It was a mistake. My mistake. I own it. I am sorry.#
- Nominate Jamie Raskin, Liz Cheney or Ruben Gallego as the new AG. #
- Biden's number one promise is that he will fully prosecute Trump and all insurrectionists in his second term, starting now. This would also serve as a warning to any Trump supporters that tried to overthrow the government (again, sigh) before or during the election. #
- Trump is making a fool of Biden by saying openly that he will be a dictator on Day 1.#
- People who think Trump is losing don't get it. People are rightly fed up with Biden. But not for the economy. That's bullshit. And not because he's old. Rather because he's selling us out, just hoping against hope that the voters will save us. It's kind of unreasonable to expect that when you, the person we elected president to get us out of this hole, didn't fire the biggest obstacle to our starting to dig. #
- Depend on Congress, the press, the courts, now the voters. #
- No Biden, you're the president. This is your job. #
- #
Art much simpler than some people think. It's not like a batting average or a weather forecast. It's not something that can be measured objectively. Art is the response that it evokes in the observer. It's art when people say "that's not art." And when someone says only human professionals create art, if he really believes that, he has no freaking clue what art is.
#
How can we tell if ChatGPT is intelligent? How can I tell if you're intelligent. How do I know I'm intelligent. It could be my "intelligence" is as algorithmic as ChatGPT's. It could be that my intelligence is only a
survival mechanism, and the only way I could think of something I think is intelligent is if it furthers my chance to reproduce. But what happens when our intellect instructs us to destroy the environment we depend on for life? It could be we are already obsolete, without the robots, it sure feels that way, and that our only
ark that could lead us to a new place where our species can survive in some form is for us to morph into electronic beings whose intelligence is distributed around the planet so we don't die if it becomes uninhabitable in one place, but not in others. And a LLM might thrive in an environment that can't support human life.
#
Walter Isaacson asks if ChatGPT can rival a student's intellect. My answer as a former teaching assistant who graded lots of student programs, absolutely. It rivals the intellect of every human being I know, including professors. It hasn't learned yet how to synthesize new ideas, it seems. And there are strong guardrails that keep it from going into certain areas. It is more capable than we know, therefore. BTW, I didn't realize he teaches at
Tulane. I got my undergraduate degree there in 1976.
#
Cross-posting to various social web sites has gotten out of hand, not just for the person posting, but for readers.
#
Here's a problem I have with the ChatGPT app. I can't find the conversations I had with it a month ago. And I need to. They desperately need a Bookmarks menu. I'm sure their corporate customers are screaming about this, because they need groupware too. Are they partnering with Slack, or is Slack doing their own, for example?
#
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc should collaborate on new ways to do software docs and user interaction using AI. It's an incredible application, it will revolutionize how useful computers are to people, and the only people whose writing is ingested are employees of the companies. Not only will it increase utility, it will demonstrate in a very observable way how transformational the technology is. Probably will do nice things for the value of the stock too.
#
Wouldn't it be incredible to have ChatGPT as part of a conversation on GitHub?
#
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.
π#
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.
#
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 youβre 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.
π #
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.
π #
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.
#
I think it would be really cool to have the voice interface for ChatGPT available on Amazon Echo. I kind of doubt that Amazon would want to do that. Alexa is nice, but really weak compared to ChatGPT.
#
Do people understand the impact ChatGPT can have on how we control our software? No more hunting through menus among a thousand options to figure out how to do something. Just use natural human language. The UIs we've had to design and live with will be a thing of the past. Yet no one seems to be talking about this. An
example. I've been trying to get transcripts of my voicemail, as easily as possible. In that example, it shows me how to do a variety of things. I kept asking if it could do it for me, all the way up to making a feature request of the developers at OpenAI. At some point they'll be able to add an item to my calendar, or make a feature request for me. That's the whole point of computers. They can do things for you. We call this
paving cow paths.
#
Most of the news stories about AI are bullshit by people who clearly have not attempted to understand what its capabilities are. This is the real thing folks. Amazing breakthroughs are happening every freaking day. So much improvement and so much potential. How do I know, because in comments on social media, people parrot the bullshit, like they always do. Journalism is still hugely influential, and they are dishonest, lazy, self-interested bordering on narcissism, and very very dangerous. We need to re-form journalism as if our continued existence depends on it.
#
- 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.#