FeedCity

New podcast: ChatGPT deserves our respect (at least).

I'd love to read an article or listen to a mainstream news podcast that explained how people are using ChatGPT-like apps, and why they think it's such a big deal, as opposed to debunking it for not being intelligent, or making stuff up, or stealing intellectual property. This has all been adequately reported.

It also is the most revolutionary use of computer technology ever, in terms of the augmentation of human intelligence. And yes, dear news person, this matters.

It's a tool for our minds, it makes up for our relatively slow processes, how long it takes us to learn new facts, and is able organize organize things to help us make better choices.

It really is amazing.

20 minutes

If you're getting this via email, things might look different.

Lots of news reports about Trump's polls. But it isn't surprising that in the transition from a democracy to autocracy the people would become increasingly unhappy with the change, until we basically give up, and the polls from some pollsters are always this way, but the polls from others tell a different story. Fox News still runs polls the old way, as does the NYT and others. But that will change, as the lawyers have, and the Washington Post and NY Times have, in their editorial functions. And they just arrested a judge in Wisconsin. Makes you think maybe it doesn't matter if the polls say what they say, if there isn't something behind them.

For Bluesky fans, we’re now cross-posting the Micro.blog news blog over to Bluesky at @micro.blog. Good way to stay up to date on new features or fixes.

For beta testers on iOS, there’s a new build of Micro.blog with a button to toggle just showing draft blog posts. This matches the functionality we’ve had on the web and Mac apps for a while. Useful if you manage lots of drafts.

If you’re not on the beta yet, feel free to sign up at this TestFlight link. We’ll release it to all customers in the coming week.

o4-mini is good at road trip planning. I fire off some parameters like roughly where I want to stop or how long to drive, let it come up with routes, hotels, things to see. It doesn’t take the joy out of travel… Still a lot of details to review and decide on.

If all goes as planned, if you're subscribed to the nightly email, you should get two copies of the posts for April 27, one sent by the old software, and one sent by the new. The story I had to do a rewrite because I misunderstood how CSS styling works in some/most email c...

I heard that Hugh Forrest was fired at SXSW. Many people loved him based on the outpouring of grief, but I didn't. They had keynotes and panels about stuff I was working on at the time, in the 90s and 00s, blogging, RSS, podcasting, bringing blogs to politics. He wouldn't take my calls. I wanted to be on stage to talk about what I was working on, and to set the record straight on what we had created. Instead my competitors got top billing and I was not allowed in. It felt corrupt to me, as if someone was trading favors behind the scenes. My hope is now SXSW, or whatever replaces it, will be more open-minded about who they include in the show. I'm still working and still have a story to tell.

Dan MacTough feels the same about AWS breaking Node devs.

I should be using the lh and rlh units more enough—they’re supported across the board!

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The foreword to the O’Reilly book on creating inclusive experiences.

Crazy finish to that Nuggets / Clippers game. Not sure I’ve ever seen a dunk so close to win it like that. 🏀

Special shout-out to @vincent for troubleshooting Micro.blog servers while I’m traveling. Driving in traffic through Brooklyn is not when I hoped to get downtime notifications! Annoying hackers trying to mess with our servers.

I asked ChatGPT for an "imaginary image of Harvard Square with middle-class people from red states visiting in their trucks and country mannerisms."

What if, before we transfer human awareness into computers, we discover proof of reincarnation. What then?

I read this article about AI and cancer research last night, thinking about it more this morning. It’s really well-researched. The title is misleading. There’s a lot of promise here, even if we might not get the “compressed 21st century” of medicine that Dario Amodei hopes for.

If Bluesky really wanted to decentralize and do it quickly, they could build a layer out of RSS and OPML on top of what they have and not only would they be able interop with other Bluesky-like services but they could also interop with Mastodon and it could all be done in a matter of weeks.

If I was president of Harvard University, I'd be thinking about how to take advantage of the spotlight the Trump Administration had focused on us. It goes beyond saying No. There's a No, and.. that could come. No and, we're going to do something about X, Y and Z -- ways that...