FeedCity

[Nieman Journalism Lab] "The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News...

Nilay Patel in the intro to the latest Decoder:

But putting a bunch of computers in a data center and running them at full tilt is how basically everything works now. If you have a moral objection to AI based on climate concerns, you might have a moral objection to TikTok and YouTube as well, which are constantly ingesting and encoding millions of hours of video.

Sounds like a good discussion.

Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the kittens earlier this summer.

Discourse’s backups are SQL, but I needed a Markdown or HTML export. I asked ChatGPT to write a quick Ruby script that loops over the possible post IDs and downloads the Markdown using the special “/raw” URLs in Discourse. Reviewed it line by line and tweaked it slightly, but it was essentially correct on the first try. It took minutes from conception to running.

Maybe there was an existing Discourse solution for this. But the fact that in the time it would take to find and install another solution, I could have AI write my own custom solution… Still just amazing.

OPML archive for July's posts on Scripting News.

One of the biggest challenges with tools for making things, even just for the web, is there are so many to choose from. Nearly every tool has a learning curve to overcome before being able to use it efficiently. With proficiency, comes the ability to pursue more efficient use...

Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."

Maya Rudolph returning to SNL! From CNN:

Rudolph will reprise her portrayal of Vice President Kamala Harris when the NBC show returns for its fiftieth season this fall, a source with knowledge of Rudolph’s plans told CNN. Rudolph will play Harris through the 2024 election.

This is going to be great.

Wednesday session

This approach from Wix to let AI write blog posts is all wrong. You know what works, though? Write your own blog post, then paste it into AI and ask it to tell you what your own post means. Then edit it yourself as needed. Really helps refine whether you’re communicating clearly enough.

This is a fun new series from Stephen Hackett on the Performa line. I had the Quadra 605 which I think really was just a Performa with a different name. Branding silliness in those days.

The blogroll on scripting.com has more features today. Screen shot.

A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers.

Landed!

Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States.

In the context of who we are as a country, what the Repubs do and say is to be very mild about it "weird." What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist who was a Republican, of the 60s, 70s and 80s, write that column.

And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things you agree with Trump on.

Podcast: 3 minutes.

Some good replies to my post about Reddit, Micro.blog, and robots.txt yesterday. One wrinkle that may not be obvious: when the pref is enabled, we run bookmarked text through AI to summarize it. This is another reason why I feel better erring on the side of respecting robots.txt. Not sure, though.

People who get their sense of self-esteem from having procreated are placing a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? How will they treat the child then! Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life, that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.

Last night’s Idina Menzel show was really something special. Didn’t realize she is also returning to Broadway next year in Redwood. She sang a couple songs from it… I’ve gotta find a way to be there.