FeedCity

Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.

I've figured out more precisely what WordLand is meant to compete with --> the tiny little text boxes of the social web. Ours is slightly bigger, and grows as your piece gets longer. Neatly arranged like the others, and all your writing flows through WordPress and RSS, where each of the TLTBs only flows into their limited and incompatible views of the social web. RSS and WordPress are a powerful distribution system. Lots of software works with those two protocols, as do many programmers, and they're both marvelously open, stable over more than twenty years each, and can't be owned by billionaires. Pretty powerful place, kind of amazing that there's so much room here, and the people are friendly. 😄

I've been alternating days here on my blog. One day, lots of posts, maybe even a podcast. And then a quiet day. Today started out quiet, and then the ideas started flowing.

I'm thinking maybe we'll do a Kickstarter for WordLand. It'll cost money to run the server and continue to develop the sofware. It fills a big enough need to ask the users to support it financially, at least to get it off the ground. The server is open source so theoretically anyone can run one. But in practice most people will probably just want to use the service. I just want to solve this problem so we can start building a developer ecosystem around WordPress that it's never had. Think of WordLand as a pump primer. 😄

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.

A tuneup for WordLand confirms when it's publishing.

I watched Ari Melber last night and noted he isn't yet on Bluesky or hasn't updated his show graphics to include it? He usually tries to be leading edge in this, and at this point he looks a bit behind the times, imho, ymmv etc. After Melber, I stayed through the opening segment of Joy Reid and was charged up by her intro. She's clicking on all cylinders. They must be thinking about gutting or reconfiguring MSNBC at this time. It's up for sale, I wonder if a billionaire will see the wisdom of owning that piece of real estate as Musk saw the value in Twitter, far beyond what the stock market valued it at. (BTW, I should add that I benefited from his largesse, I was a very small shareholder in Twitter at the time. I did not want to sell, but my vote didn't matter. Heh.)

I've been thinking about Blogger Of The Year for a few months, and had a choice, but then Paul Krugman left the NYT, and set up shop on Substack, and has been totally kicking ass every day for the last week. Presumably these are all things the NYT wouldn't let him run? Or if ...

I've got a new project called davegpt, it's in GitHub, open source of course. I also created a ChatGPT project with the same code (new feature introduced on Monday). Presumably I can ask it questions about the code. Because I have a worknotes.md file in the GitHub project, C...

What could journalism do to help the country? Move your shows out into the red territories. Make it a requirement that Chris and Joy, Lawrence or Rachel, if they want to stay on the air, have to broadcast from one of the red states. It could be a large city in a red state. The reason is symbolic and practical. The red state voters wouldn't be such a mystery if you knew some of them from your everyday life. And you might have a few of them on the show. You have some selling to do, the idea you're selling is that you care about the people you don't know.

The Democrats are, of course, failing to lead the 75 million who voted for them in the last election, which was a bit over a month ago. Maybe they should factor that into their thinking, what kind of relationship would you have with an organization that only cared about what you thought if they needed something very specific from you in that exact moment. Any other time, who are you again? We are without leaders.

I get my greatest ideas walking, riding my bike, on a ski lift, or sitting in a hot tub esp when it's really cold out and there's a full moon as there was last night. Sometimes the ideas prove workable and other times they're like the great brainstorms one had with cocaine i...

I'm farting around with the OpenAI API. I have a nice encapsulation for calls to ChatGPT, one that hides all the tricky stuff, all you need is an apiToken to make it work, something that is available for free. The first place I put it is in an outliner. Basically I can write a question in a headline, click an icon and the response from ChatGPT is placed in a series of sub-heads. Interesting to see that they use Markdown to convey the response. The logical choice. I'm not sure how or if I will use this in my writing, but now I have an idea what it's good for. Here's a screen shot of a question I asked and the answer. Also the API is very slow. A question like that would be displayed instantly in their app, in my app it takes a half minute. And I have to pay for it, whereas in their app it's all covered by my $20 a month subscription.

Interesting episode of the Daily podcast about AI in Hollywood. They specifically mention a new movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, with bodies and faces edited by AI to be various ages other than what they are (mid-late 60s). The movie Here, was rated not too great by various critics including the NYT.

Martin Luther King Day is January 20 in 2025, also is Inauguration Day.

Deep in the thread: "I want to give a huge volume of writing to ChatGPT or something much like it, and then ask it to give me an outline of what I wrote, and allow me to massage the outline, churn out a synopsis. I'd like to see what's there, and there's far too much writing for me to do that."

What if you had a twitter-like system that was embedded in a ChatGPT-like app. What would you do with that?

The journalism I pay attention is labeling itself as truth-based -- but it most definitely is not. When it comes to topics I am expert in, they tell a mushed up version of extreme points of view, that (surprise!) favor the continued existence of their jobs. The choice of the truth-based label is kind of a clue. 😄

This post spawned quite a thread on Bluesky: "The AI industry could give us easy tools to build our own models, from our own archived writing, for private use. This may be a blind spot. It's as if when personal computers started, instead of spreadsheet editors, we were offered great sets of tabulated recalc'ing data. Fun to watch, maybe useful for researchers, but nothing compared to the utility of playing 'what if' on our own models."

A piece in today's NYT said all networks flame out, but that's actually too crude a statement. If you want your network not to flame out, give the users the tools to keep things moderated. One of the best features of Facebook is it gives the author of a post the power to de...

ChatGPT gets projects. Haven't had a chance to explore, but I desperately need this. I organize all my work as projects, and need to have my ChatGPT work be part of that.

There was a moment a couple of years ago when Mastodon was gaining traction in a serious way when I thought that Automattic should do something publicly to demonstrate support for it because I felt that WordPress and Mastodon were two sides of the same important coin. As yo...

It's a big enough umbrella but it's always me that ends up getting wet.

Possibly the last moment when the Dems really kicked ass.

I saw a pundit suggest people harass people who drive Teslas.

When I bought mine, it cost $70K, a large sum of money that I will not throw away just so a pundit can make a point.

Here's my rebuttal. I'd like to see you get on without buying Exxon products. We all agree they suck, but evil companies have a way of building dependence, that's how the stay in business while openly doing despicable things.

When I put down $70K for what is, btw, a fantastic car, no one knew how evil Elon Musk was going to turn out to be, how little he would care what you and I think.

And I don't believe anyone can live a pure life and extract all evil from it, and still participate in civilization.

BTW, I hear that Safari now defaults to using HTTPS. Not sure exactly what that means. But if they ever actually stop showing scripting.com, which will always be plain old HTTP, I'll probably ship an Electron product that browse the web, and doesn't care if it's HTTP or whatever new fad Google is promoting these days. I'm going to hold down the fort for the original web, I can't change scripting.com to HTTPS, it would break all the images and probably a lot of other stuff. I fight linkrot, don't bring it on, and fuck Google for thinking they own the freaking web. I use their products, just like I drive a Tesla. Can't help it.

The all-new kickass Democratic Party might use this image for motivation.

A valued tester of WordLand asked a series of questions, which I answered in some detail, and felt it was a good idea to post the answers here on my blog. Any kind of feedback you want to give is totally welcome. I'd prefer it be in the GitHub issues section so it might ins...

I have United Healthcare insurance. I got it as part of my Medicare package when I turned 65. I've had good experience with them. I had major surgery in 2002, cost hundreds of thousands, included a one-week hospital stay and lots of followup treatments. I know the hospital did all the work with them, I was shielded from any complications, but as far as I know there were none. Never had a treatment questioned or denied. I had another insurance provider for many years after that, but when given a chance I went back to United. Just want to say, so far -- knock wood -- I am a happy customer.

Bingeworthy has RSS, and new ratings show up in my blogroll.