This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis. But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be ...

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

Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years. I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of H...

This is my permanent political rant, podcast-style. The Repubs figured it out via Trump in 2016, use Twitter to campaign every day of every year. The Dems campaign intensely for a few months every four years. The rest of the time it's as if the Dems don't even take the field...

On Bluesky, I wrote a post to Oliver Willis, who writes at Daily Kos: This podcast elaborates on that simple idea. We still have media, we don't have to wait for the leaders of the Democratic Party to tell Americans what the Repubs are doing in terms that mean something to ...

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in Bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in Bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

This podcast goes into more depth of this idea.

There is a transcript.

I had my first confrontation about what's stirring in the WordPress world. I've tried to record this podcast a few times before, but today it became clear that I could get embroiled in the emotions flowing around WordPress now. There's a strong community there, and the angs...

It's been a while since I released a podcast so here goes..

As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It's also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic technical problems.

"What we needed was an encyclopedic, conversational simulated programming partner, that has infinite knowledge of everything. But unfortunately not the best judgment."

There's a transcript.

I keep having to answer the question of what I think about Podcasting 2.0, I thought I should say it clearly, in a podcast of course. 😀 A lightly edited quote from this cast: "Podcasting is in trouble and needs our help and it needs good ideas that accentuate the power of ha...

"I hope this doesn't give Trump any ideas" is what I thought when I heard that the president of South Korea had out of the blue declared martial law. You probably thought it too.

I decided it was time to tell the story of how we elected Trump even though we had a 4-year demo, including COVID and an attempted overthrow of the US government.

We knew who he was, and we said give us more of that.

We are out of our minds.

Includes a transcript.

PS: Recorded on Tuesday, published on Thursday.

PPS: It turns out the president of South Korea was actually trying to give Trump an idea.

PPPS: The people of South Korea told the president to go to hell.

Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating.

This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete.

Here's a transcript.

I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing. Meanwhile...

We start with what didn't work about the election of 2024 as the question du jour, and the answer is basically everything. The Democratic Party is a funnel which tries to funnel what the elites think we need without triggering Jake Tapper or Maggie Haberman or the publisher ...