FeedCity

I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think you could use it very effectively to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders forced us to think of her as a mom. I don't think that works out very well in her favor, probably best not to go there.

I was driving on a mountain road yesterday to pick up a pizza in a nearby town. I drive it fairly regularly, and I have a car that handles well so I drive at the speed limit or a little above. Still, what often happens on this road is some asshole tailgates, getting so clos...

Interesting thread on a simple upgrade for any podcasting client that would create a network of tools people could use for subscribing and listening. I've tried to get people who make podcast clients to listen. Yes I am a user, but I also designed the technology, and did the first implementations, so I know what's possible. The medium could work so much better if they simply adopted the interests of their users. I never want to lock users into my products, I want them to choose them because they're the best.

Podcast: Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere.

I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think hi...

I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it. Actually I know they don't have any respect for it. That's why depending on them for access to it seems too flimsy to build on.

I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass.

When will ChatGPT be able to do a transcript of an audio file?

I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that.

Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath.

I have a linkblogging tool crossposts to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, WordPress and RSS.

Every time I publish a link it goes to all those places,

The RSS feed is doing a lot of the work.

• Links from the RSS feed show up on my Links page and in the nightly emails.
• The RSS feed is also used to connect to Threads, going through micro.blog. I am able to give it the URL of the linkblogging feed, and then click on Add Threads -- and that's it. When I post something to the feed it shows up on Threads.

This feature is tucked away in a corner of micro.blog and I suspect most people don't know it's there. It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems. If you're a micro.blog user, its Feeds page is where you set it up. Screen shot.

Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon.

I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home.

I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.

Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers, for me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.

You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters.

If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning.

And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference.

I'm voting straight Democratic party line.

I find that a lot of my posts here on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline. I could make it work once again, but it would be wasted if I couldn't send it to all four of the services I use regularly. Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. But each of them is acting as if they are alone. This is a mistake, for sure for the open web, but I think it may be a strategic mistake for each of them. I could cite lots of examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that had existed before, and with remarkable speed. None of them are strong enough to try to dominate.

If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.

BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.

Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.

I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it

Hecklers at last night's rally in Greensboro, couldn't hear what they were angry about, but it had something to do with Gaza.

The US isn't doing the killing there, the issue is with Netanyahu who is part of the same political party as Trump. So you can be pretty sure the killing won't stop there at least until after our election. One way to be sure the killing continues is to elect Trump.

It's wonderful that we're laughing at Trump now.

What a joke to think that after all he took us through, there are 47% of the people in the country who want more of that!

OMG we must be crazy. What else are you going to do but laugh.

I keep seeing mention of "Podcast 2.0" in various places. That is unusually greedy, even for the tech industry. What next? Deprecating the way podcasting has worked for the last 20 years? How do we know the people doing this aren't shilling for Spotify, Google or Amazon? Please don't mess with something that works as well as podcasting. You want to do something better, great -- make your own name and get people to respect it. Stealing respect from podcasting tells me you have no honor or self-respect, and it should say the same to everyone else. Something else that tells you it's bad, they never bothered to send me an email. Welcome to the tech industry.

I just added a link to the RSS feed in each shownotes page. In the HTML at the bottom, as a white on orange icon. In the page source as a <link rel="alternate">.

Show notes for a short podcast I recorded on this day in 2004, a response to Adam's podcast which I had just listened to. These were the good days, a new medium in its early stages of booting up, after years of trying to get it to go. In the next few weeks, it'll really start going. You can subscribe to the podcast feed here.

I was trying to explain to Miguel de Icaza, a longtime developer friend, how Dropbox was within inches of making the web a million times more useful, ten years ago, and then backed away from it. I don't think I've ever told the story here on my blog, so here goes. In 2014, ...

Just watched a Harris rally in Charlotte NC. She's using what Trump said in the debate in her new campaign speech. Brilliant. Getting him on the record in that context is a gift. 60 million viewers. Up till then he only took interviews where he could bully his way past the interviewer.

Braintrust query: I got an email from OpenAI saying I could access the new models, but I don't see the new models in the popup menu.