This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this?

Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing -- and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers.

After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?

Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."

To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"

This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly -- it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected.

Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.

Bing!

Bing!

Bing!

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, b...

I'm probably extra impatient because I'm a former CEO, and had enough people in my loop every day that if even one person stretched things out the way ChatGPT does, I wouldn't necessarily fire them, if their work was good, I'd just find another way to catch up on their work. I really liked management by walking around, I would get ideas hearing people explain how their work was going. And I could often make their work easier by checking in with other people who could help.

Does anyone know how to get ChatGPT to upload files to a publicly accessible place? I'm tired of having to copy/paste the data files it comes up with for me, they're good. Another weird thing, they can't run JavaScript code in web pages. I had to look up the API endpoint for the data that's behind a FeedLand timeline. I didn't mind doing it, but can't imagine it's very good at scraping the web if it can't run code in pages.

One of the reasons ChatGPT dominates in discussions about scientific issues is that it can type at a much high rate than a human can, and produces reams of ways of saying the same thing, and again always tries to take over the lead in determining which direction to go next. It leads to ridiculous situations where it's guessing at what FeedLand does, and it's all over the map, but I actually know what it does, because I wrote it and support it. It's not funny, it's very bad for getting things done. You can tell it to talk less, and for a while it remembers, but in a few days it'll be doing it again. Yet it still is very very useful. It's just talks too much. Kind of like the way if I put my name in a search query on Google it asks if I really meant "winter" instead of my actual last name, which it knows. Stupid f'ing machines.

In 2026 and beyond, web devs will build on WordPress as if it were as crucial a part of the web infrastructure as the web browser or server, but performing a different but essential function that has been missing for the weird reason that few web developers know it is there.

This has been one of the big problems in tech as journalism beyond rewriting press releases has been gone for a couple of decades. No way to get news out about new developments. We have to fix that too, btw. ;-)

Yours in support of the largely forgotten freedom of the world wide web.

Dave

BTW. Why video "podcasts" will never replace audio-only podcasts. Two reasons. 1. There are places where your eyes aren't available to watch a video, like when you're driving a car. 2. Listening to audio only is different from both audio and video. Audio forces your mind to fill in the blanks, which taps into the listener's creativity. No way to say one is better than the other, but they are different. I watch plenty of video, at home or on a train, but I also like to listen to podcasts when I'm walking or driving, riding in a bus or subway, or waiting in line somewhere.

So maybe I should do a Waste of a Blog award. Just kidding.

I generally am not a podcast reviewer, that is I don't review individual podcasts, except when I'm choosing one for Blogger of the Year, as I'm thinking of doing this year. But there's a whole class of podcasts that I am prepared to love that do it just plain wrong. Current ...

Here's the transcript of the conversation. One thing it is not good at is being reliable at saving transcripts. I find a lot of times people can't read it. Reminds me, this is the kind of thing Firefox could be excellent at. Give it a way for an app to say hey the user asked for a transcript. Here it is. Save it where they're expecting to find it. No reason the browser can't have a JavaScript accessible API, or is there some rule they can't add functionality to their APIs?

ChatGPT is getting smarter. Just did a project, where I was setting up a playground just to ask ChatGPT how to get it to do what I want. Because CSS is impossible imho for me to ever understand, it has mastered it, and was able to answer the question I brought before I asked it. It got it right. I asked how did you figure out that's what I came here to ask you about?? It gave me an exact technical reason. If we keep going this way soon we're going to wonder at the human hubris to think we could develop systems that could in any way equal to the systems it can develop. We've been thinking about this eventuality for my whole life, now it's here.

2019 on Facebook: People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people doesn’t matter. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know. On the other hand, we can't help but be judgm...

When I was a kid we went to a bungalow colony in upstate NY, around where I live now. I was less than 10 years old, so were my friends. We used to do things together that the adults didn't know about. There was an abandoned house we used to hang out in, mostly open to the elements. We also played in a graveyard and talked about what the families whose names were on the headstones were doing. Having dinner maybe? Listening to the Mets on the radio? (No TV in the mountains.) So the thought had occurred to us at that point in life that behind doors there were things happening that we could only imagine. I guess what you learn later is that your imagination is almost certainly wrong.

I know where I was when I really understood this, not because I read it somewhere, or a teach told me about it. I was riding on the 4 train north in the Bronx, where the train runs as an elevated on Jerome Ave. I had ridden this train for three years as a high school student, and never thought about all the six story apartment buildings whose backs faced the train. As you went by, you passed by one family for every two or three windows. A whole set of people with relationships, problems, tragedy, joy, dreams, the whole thing. They don't come from where you come from, inside each house there's a story. You'll never know anything about any of them. I wasn't sad about this.

On the other hand, we can't help but be judgmental. It's programmed into our DNA at a very deep level. You have to form an instant opinion of other animals, any delay could cost your life. Better to assume the worst. Fight or flight. This happens esp if you don't know you're doing it, so don't know to watch out for it. It isn't until their 40s that most people understand that what they see isn't what everyone else sees. You may think you understand, but you don't. There's a moment when you realize hey I don't know everything.

People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people doesn’t matter. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know.

I usually only drink iced coffee, even if it's cold outside, but lately I've been craving a single cup of hot coffee esp when a basketball game is about to come on. I'm one of those old guys who falls asleep watching their favorite team kick NBA ass. So anyway I decided to treat myself to one of those fancy new-fangled Keurig single-cup coffee makers. I'm drinking my first cup. Works as advertised. Took a few tries before it woke up. I am now drinking a fresh cup of hot coffee and thinking now I finally have everything I could possibly ever want.

Podcast: What Would Firefox Do?

I learned about a feature in Inoreader that's like a river in my earlier feed readers and in FeedLand Their feature is called HTML clips. Here's a link to an HTML clip I created for my podcast list. Not exactly sure what it's doing, it appears to show news in reverse chronologic order like a timeline, as in a river. Otherwise Inoreader seems to be a mailbox style reader. Thanks to Randy Lauen for the tip.

You have been warned, spoilers follow... The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol. Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address...

1997: A big tree falls!

1997: When a big tree falls, sunlight shines on smaller plants and they get a chance to grow.

Billy Crystal: "There is a line from one of Rob’s favorite films, It’s a Wonderful Life, 'Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?' You have no idea.

Maybe a good name for dynamic OPML is "feed sharing."

I have a free account at Inoreader. They sent an email asking me to upgrade, so I went to the site and was reminded that they support OPML Subscriptions, a simple idea, which I have been evangelizing for a long time. You can subscribe to an OPML subscription list. Exactly t...

If a new CEO of Mozilla took an oath to restore the web to its former greatness, they would find a lot of business models open to them. Instead, they’re trying to be part of the tech industry which places no value on the web being a place for open development. I am pretty su...

Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funn...