FeedCity

I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.

I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.

The other day as I was sitting on my meditation cushion after finishing my session, I started thinking about my non-negotiables: things I do that are—or at least should be—part of every day of my life that I am not willing to compromise on. It goes without saying that the o...

Glitch.com was, according to their homepage: […] the friendly place where everyone builds the web. Start a new blog, play with React, or build new worlds with WebXR. Others have said a lot more than I could about the history of Glitch. I’m here to deliver a eulog- Well, uh...

Progress update on the AV cart

Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.

Glitch.com was, according to their homepage: […] the friendly place where everyone builds the web. Start a new blog, play with React, or build new worlds with WebXR. Others have said a lot more than I could about the history of Glitch. I’m here to deliver a eulog- Well, uh...

Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example out there to crib from.

The last three trad sessions I played in were in three different countries—Sunday in Cork, Tuesday in Brighton, Wednesday in Amsterdam—lovely tunes each time!

💜

Two common questions I hear from those just starting out into the typewriter space are frequently about the basics: How do I use a typewriter? How to take care of typewriters or do basic maintenance? Naturally there is a ton of colloquial advice you’ll receive on these topics from social media and YouTube, but it’s … Continue reading Typewriter Use and Typewriter Maintenance for Beginning to Intermediate Typists

Day 6 of the photo challenge, contrast. Jack London Square / C. L. Dellums Station in Oakland.

For a minute I got really excited about this headline of a LoveFrom-designed electric bike from Rivian. But… a screen and it’s “bike-like”? I’ve been eyeing a new electric bike and always prefer something that looks like an actual, old-fashioned bike. No need to reinvent everything for this.

More jacaranda trees in bloom.

Reviewing my short post last night about the NYT vs. OpenAI data retention, maybe “wild” overreach was an unnecessary adjective. I also hadn’t seen OpenAI’s response:

As part of their baseless lawsuit, they’ve recently asked the court to force us to retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation that they might find something that supports their case.

There are very real fair-use questions for training, but I’m not sure they can be resolved by this lawsuit, and probably not without updating copyright law.

Joanne Jang who works at OpenAI has a blog post on human-AI relationships:

…many people say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them.

I read this last night and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out why I usually type to an AI chatbot with proper spelling and punctuation, even correcting my chat text when I make a typo. It doesn’t matter, the robots don’t care. But it’s almost like if I skip that step, if I’m careless, I’ve somehow compromised all of my writing.

I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible wh...

A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.