An archive of the previous version, built around GitHub.

I did a rewrite of the FeedCorps page in FeedLand. You get to it through the Reading Lists sub-menu of the Tools menu. There are three lists in the new version. A lot were false starts, they didn't make the cut. I'm always adding feeds to my blogroll and news.scripting.com. Unfortunately I can't say the same for podcasts, which are not hooked up to my podcast app. I really want a hot connection there. We'll get there. The reading lists feature is going to play a big role going forward in the open social web we're building. BTW, I really like the name FeedCorps. I haven't talked about it very much. It's a cause, like peace or freedom. Open those suckas up. Feeds all the way babe.

A few days ago I worked with ChatGPT to generate an RSS feed of news that interests me. Here's a writeup with a place to comment and perhaps to collaborate on doing this for real. ChatGPT has real limits. This has to be done off on the side. It certainly could be done with their API. I'm head-down on other projects and can't do it myself but as I explain in the writeup, it would plug in beautifully to stuff I'm doing and it would all be open, so a new kind of feed reader is possible. And we could find news from other bloggers that the journalists aren't reporting on, the same way we relied on blogs in the early days to learn about what was going on on the web. It's time to do that again.

Back in the beginning I wanted the web to be like Harvard. It's one of the reasons I went there as a research fellow in 2003. I wasn't satisfied with the web, the density of minds wasn't up to my expectations, so I thought if I brought the web to the minds, that might work ...

Yesterday I wrote a quick review of ChatGPT 5, after trying a simple programming exercise with it. It was an awful collaboration because it lied to me about its capabilities, leading me to develop a feature in my software to support the capability that it later admitted that...

That said, it got pretty far toward solving the problem I asked it to work on. Here's a demo of a page it put together for me of the top 25 articles in US news.

ChatGPT is even more of a bastard than 4.

New version of feedlandSocket. It's now an NPM package you can include in Node projects. The demo is more useful, and there's a video of what it looks like as it scrolls through the JavaScript console. WebSockets + feeds. A fairly important component of an open social web system.

A summary of recent work via my WordLand blog.

This is a picture of my dear departed Uncle Vava taken in the early 1970s in my parents' house in Flushing. It just showed up in my On This Day list on Facebook, thought it belongs on the blog too. .

I recorded a good podcast yesterday about how I develop new stuff like podcasting, and how it only works if there isn't a huge dominant platform vendor to FUD the project. That's why RSS worked, sort of -- we did get FUDded by the RDF folk, who had a few famous people on thei...

I wanted to put together a demo of a very simple but interesting Node.js app, so I hooked up with replit, and was surprised to find out that it's now an AI bot. But when I asked it to make a sandbox for this app, which is in a repo on GitHub, rather than take the direct route, and run the demo.js app (which is what I asked it to do), it concocted a pointless user interface, that hid all the interesting bits. This was a demo for programmers for crying out loud. I want to show them the machinery in motion. I'm going to try again today.

Perspective: I view WordPress as if it's my own product.

I added two new subscription lists to lists.opml.org and it's better organized and more concise.

A Brian Lehrer segment on specialized high schools in NYC. I went to one of them, signed up for the test mostly to get out of school for a day, and got in. Back in those days (the early 70s) no one studied for the test as far as I know. It has become very competitive and there's an issue of the racial makeup of the student body. As always Lehrer does a great podcast.

Not much time to blog today, might have a podcast later. In the meantime I did a search of Daytona for object database, a term that goes back to the early days and makes for an interesting browse, at least for me.

A podcast I recorded this morning, prime time, while getting things done, and having ChatGPT getting in the way. It needs to become more invisible, there's no suspension of disbelief when you're working with it. I think we can do much better at finding a robot that can really augment human intelligence. This is awful stuff. We have to work on these dynamics.

Whenever you have to get something done with a company, get ready for lots of phone tag, waiting on hold, talking to bots, getting screened, trying to convince a computer that you have legitimate business, and no, what you're looking for isn't on their website (believe me I looked). The stupid thing about it is that ChatGPT is becoming more like those things every day. Companies have built awful systems for getting anything done that might eat into their profits. Google is the absolute worst. Even for services that cost real money, they absolutely will not help. You better hope everything goes perfectly if you buy their service.

news.scripting.com is still going strong. Open to the public, no login.

My contribution to 715-999-7483.com. Now it's your turn!

Since the govt is no longer funding NPR maybe they could stop bending over for the Repubs. Lay it all out there, stop spinning all the crazy fascist authoritarianism as both-sides and normal partisan politics. They know we're in a lot deeper. Since we're now paying the bills, how about plain facts.

Academics, who speak scientific language, won't say "there's no antisemitism at UCLA" because we know that's not true. Antisemitism is everywhere, the question is how limiting and dangerous is it. And how often is it encountered. I grew up in the 1960s in a Queens neighborh...

Gaslighting is everywhere. ChatGPT just said to me "I understand why you feel that way." It has nothing to do with my feelings. I don't have feelings about computers. It lied to me over and over just now. I said you're lying to me. "I understand why you feel that way." As if it were the all-knowing feeling-inferring god-like creature it is not. The real question for me is this -- Does Open AI program it to be this way. Think about the opportunities it has to introduce true feelings of insecurity and worthlessness. That's the purpose of gaslighting. It's evil.

WordPress would will make a much better open social web server than any other software out there. We can all develop any component around a solid, documented, simple and widely supported open source API.

What if we all wore ICE-style masks as we went around doing our business.

If a baseball player's uniform didn't have a number or name.

Let's all be anonymous. It's very practical, we don't want to get doxxed either!

A podcast about a podcast users' API.

It's always a good idea to get a second opinion with AI stuff. ChatGPT may give you a convoluted answer where Claude.ai gives you a concise one.

I've been working on the top level of WordLand, and finally got to a place where navigation feels good, like this is the right track. So I took a snapshot so I can come back and look at this later, and I don't mind sharing with my blog readers with the look and feel of what might be coming.

A basic question I had about the ChatGPT agents that I can answer now that I have the feature, is whether or not the code you create that way can run on a server, where you can give it a URL and make it an endpoint other networked software can call. Or if it could run periodically, say once every five minutes for a function that was creating an RSS feed anyone could subscribe to. The answer is no -- it can't do either of these things. I'm sure they could do it at a technical level, but they don't want to host applications. But now I may understand better why they want to make a web browser, I bet you will be able to call these agents from apps that run in the browser. And in their case, they might not even have to support JavaScript? Heh. A wholly different programming model? Maybe I'm overestimating how much they're biting off?

One of the more depressing things in having so much code that I can easily search, is the number of times I've rewritten the same code without remembering I had written it before. Yesterday I did it knowingly, I wanted a function that could tell me if one of a set of categori...