FeedCity

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.

Another benefit of ChatGPT. It forces you to think and express yourself in tight logical language. Garbage in garbage out. All of a sudden rigorous thinking is required to get a result. This is very different from social media, where garbage is rewarded.

Last night's podcast about how AI is a revolution. I had just listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with the EIC at Wired, saying the hype was bullshit. You hear this from journalists a lot. The only way you can conclude this, imho, is if you aren't actually paying attention. It's as if you were a journalist in the 60s and said the story of the Beatles is that their hair must be fake, no one actually wears their hair like that. OK, whatever you say, but have you listened to the freaking music??

Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business." Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google ...

Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"

But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.

Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot:

I needed a "featured image" for my WordCamp post, so I gave ChatGPT a simple assignment. "Imagine a place called WordLand." Last year this was a miracle, now it's so-what, but I still think it's a freaking miracle.

Lots of embarrassing typos in a post yesterday on why I need WordLand. I did something unusual, I fixed the post this morning, and cleared up some of the ideas. It was an important post and equally important to get it right. I also cross-posted it on the WordCamp Canada site.

Listened to a segment on today's Brian Lehrer podcast about how to keep the good feelings from a vacation when you get back home. Here's my idea. Before you leave make a list of the things you like about being on vacation. Take it home, put it somewhere you can find it when you're feeling down and want that feeling back. Pick one of the things on the list and do it. Your subconscious will tune into it as an act of self-love and give you some of the body chemistry that you felt when you were hanging out at the beach or hiking the Applachian Trail. A similar idea in a Bruce Sterling talk in 2009.

Everything in ChatGPT is so nice. I just asked it about a random plant I got as a gift, and it gave me a beautiful one pager with everything I would have had to spend time searching for all right there, beautifully laid out, and all the fine UI touches you might think of already in. It's studying us and learning, and picking out the good stuff, at least so far. The web was like this too in the beginning, mind-exploding inventions every day. We called them mind bombs. The journalists and social media influencers all just complain, while there is a revolution happening, progress that had slowed to a snail pace, or very often went in reverse, is now coming at breakneck speed. This is as transformative innovation as there has ever been, not that I have much perspective on those that happened before I was invented, but it's as big as the Beatles, the PC, web, mobile.

Why I need WordLand. I’m primarily a writer, my podcasts reflect that, so most of the work I do on each podcast is in writing the show notes. I have a template the writing and audio flow through. Here's an example of a page rendered through that template. We’re doing similar things with WordPress using themes. The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, then flow my writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools. I understand WordPress so far has a steady workflow thru the block editor, but their are workflows for designers and writers. WordLand is the flow for writers.

One of my favorite features in the newest version of Bingeworthy is that it can generate a ChatGPT review of a program. Screen shot. I wouldn't have opened this up before because of that would let in the weirdness of the internets. This way we can find out what people thought, as sanitized by ChatGPT. BTW do you think the root of sanitized is sane? As the root of ignorant is ignore? Of course Our Friend has the answer. One is and the other isn't.

I wasn't planning on this, but there was a report that there was a problem with BingeWorthy, and I looked into it and was able to fix it.

When I added a feature that lets you ask ChatGPT to review the program you're looking at, I broke the ability to add a new program to the database. It took about 15 minutes to track down and verify and fix -- and now that very important function works again.

As long as I was in there working around, I updated the Bingeworthy RSS feed to only report program additions. The other events it was reporting just weren't as interesting.

I also added that feed to my blogroll on scripting.com.

I'd say it works a lot better now.

If you had asked a mathematician for advice on the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech, it was a totally foreseeable outcome that money would overwhelm speech, that the only speech would be money. We're right there now.

No blogging this Saturday, enjoyed goofing off for a change. 😄

I've rarely been this happy to receive a new feature.

I have a plan of course. I'll let you know how it goes! :-)

I got tired of my old sound system, too many wires, a big receiver whose functions I never used, all designed long before the 4-year-old 65-inch OLED screen on top of it all, so I downscaled to a Sony soundbar, figured that was as simple as you could get, for $300, thinking ...

BTW, this business with Trump and the Fed is almost exactly what I wanted Obama to do with Garland when McConnell refused to hold hearings. Walk him over to the Supreme Court, unlock his office, swear him in and get back to work. Sometimes you just do it. The Dems weren't pragmatic that way.

When trying to "work" with ChatGPT, realize that it's mistakes could be much worse than you could possibly imagine. It could be leading you down a blind alley. You must always consider how full of shit it is. It may not just be making things up, but it could not understand something very basic about what you're doing. There's no limit to the ways it can be wrong. And you can waste whole programming sessions chasing a solution where none could possibly every under any circumstances be found.

Question: I have a site with a well developed set of categories, I've added to it carefully over a few months, it covers most of the topics I write about. Another site has a small set of categories. I write all my WordPress posts in the same editor, and could easily set it up so that all categories were available to me in every site I post to. The question: Is that a good practice in the world of WordPress? I noticed that categories are given global ID's so if I use a category like "movies" it will have the same ID as yours has on your sites. I love this idea of a global namespace for categories, and see it as something that could be adopted by sites written in any other writing environment. Anyway, if you have a moment to comment, I'd appreciate your ideas.

You can see from this Bluesky post that I do copy-edit my linkblog items, but not enough. The web isn't a write-only medium, so to say that Bluesky is part of the web, well in this way it isn't.

If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone.

Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth.

Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? And let me know which is your favorite AI "universe." Also yeah Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for. If instead, they had some focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will. 😄

Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change. Here we go.

I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is.

When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment.

The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers.

That's my best advice for a Tuesday.

I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?

"You're an important caller," the machine lied as if it were human.