FeedCity

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...

As you get older your memory gets less reliable. It makes programming more of a challenge because as your software gets more features, there's more to remember and at the same time your codebase is getting bigger you are getting older. I wonder if there isn't some way to use ...

I think I'm going to put in my will that ChatGPT should run the Dave Winer persona on all social networks, and my blog, as long as the money lasts. It would tell stories that I would likely tell, take political stands that I would take, draw meta-pictures of my sad and depressed programmer friend and a cute and adorable kitty getting into all kinds of trouble. The seasons would come and go, and there would be Dave, still diggin. And of course he would continue to develop software, using some of the greatest tried and true tools, reminding everyone of how great Frontier -- but -- if only it ran on Linux. The long-lived fearless and fully paid-up version of Uncle D.

I got hoisted with my own Picard.

A change would do us good too.

I have a lot of code written before ChatGPT. Sometimes, as I read my old code, I wonder how the heck I ever figured that out without it.

Podcast. It's time for things to change. Two examples, Wired and Harvard. Change was always coming, but now you can't turn away from it very long before it re-appears.

Source OPML for July 2025 blog posts.

Welcome to August. More than half the summer is behind us. We're still here. The shelves in the supermarket are full of good stuff to eat. We've had about the normal amount of hot weather, and a good amount of rain but not too much. The Mets are doing OK, all things considered. They opened a Pho restaurant in Bearsville and it's good. Health, not too bad, all things considered. Still diggin!

Podcast: AI should behave like a computer.

It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API.

I abhor body shaming even if it's of someone whose ideas I find unacceptable.

Disclaimer: I own zero stock in AI companies, except for mutual funds and some Apple stock I've held for decades for sentimental and tax reasons.

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.