FeedCity

Wednesday afternoon session in Belfast

This is the rendering of my linkblog in WordPress. This is a major milestone. We have in WordPress, what you see on the Links page on scripting.com, implemented entirely in WordPress.

BTW, I say ChatGPT instead of "AI" because I'm not comfortable characterizing it as intelligence. Deeper you get into it you learn that these beings whatever they are have serious character flaws that are counter-intelligent.

Another benefit of ChatGPT. It forces you to think and express yourself in tight logical language. Garbage in garbage out. All of a sudden rigorous thinking is required to get a result. This is very different from social media, where garbage is rewarded.

Last night's podcast about how AI is a revolution. I had just listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with the EIC at Wired, saying the hype was bullshit. You hear this from journalists a lot. The only way you can conclude this, imho, is if you aren't actually paying attention. It's as if you were a journalist in the 60s and said the story of the Beatles is that their hair must be fake, no one actually wears their hair like that. OK, whatever you say, but have you listened to the freaking music??

Lobby aquarium fish.

I got out of all stocks last year. If we had money to burn, I might invest in Figma. Seems like they’ve got things figured out. But also there’s too much hype around anything in the tech industry. Established companies will be fine. OpenAI will be fine. Everyone else, who knows. 💸

The Onion: Historians Confirm Lewis And Clark Set Out On Expedition To Justify Purchase Of Expensive Camping Equipment:

You can imagine how, if you had just blown the equivalent of $80,000 in today’s money on a keelboat you didn’t need, you too might feel stupid not taking it out on the river.

🤣

This special edition of Tigana looks beautiful. I can’t justify the price, but I would like to get a hardcover version one day, to go with my old paperback. It’s a favorite I haven’t read in forever.

I’ve been pulled in different directions lately and have a lot to catch up. But I did write some code today. Also working on something that uses ID.me, which I’ll hopefully announce tomorrow if they approve my OAuth access. Argh, gatekeepers!

Designing a values-centered life from first principles.

I listened to an Evan Osnos podcast interview with Katie Drummond. Osnos is a reporter at the New Yorker, Drummond is the top editor at Wired.

Summary: AI is not just hype — it’s a transformative breakthrough on the scale of past revolutions like the web and personal computing. But journalism risks missing the story by filtering it only through billionaires or old frameworks. What’s needed is realism, openness, and listening to a wider range of voices.

PS: Sorry for the abbreviated show notes. Technical difficulties prevented me from iterating over it last night.

I grew up in the 20th Century. Because of that, I suspect my first experience of the word “totem” was probably in a piece of fictional media (television, probably) where the word “totem pole” was used. That usage was likely not respectful to the Native Americans depicted in the fiction. see Reel Injun That doesn’t...

Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business." Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google ...

Maybe it’s been too long since I’ve seen Downton Abbey, but I like The Gilded Age even more. Great balance between the different characters' stories and also the train business, which I love.

Tuesday afternoon session in Belfast

Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"

But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.

Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot: