You're going to think this is crazy, but maybe we should do what the hippie kids did in the 60s and 70s, giving flowers to the new cops in DC. Start off saying we don't blame you, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, let's all be Americans and remember what that means.

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems.

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

I want to work on the open web with other developers who make interesting products that we can hook up together to make new products. Or if users get an idea for linking two products, they can do it with scripting. It was a dream we had for the Mac, but it fell apart because...

Fixed a bit of breakage on the Links page over the weekend.

Theory about why we don’t fight to save the US.

Many of us haven’t personally felt much impact.

No hyperinflation yet.

The police still respond as they always have, wearing badges, faces uncovered.

The shelves are full at the supermarket.

The electricity is on, as is the internet. Buses and subways are running. The airports are open.

The Obamas and Clintons are still free, living in the US.

We read the news about universities and news orgs giving in. Corruption at the FBI and in Congress and the Supreme Court.

No major hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, tornados so cuts at FEMA not felt yet.

And we’ve been living in a normal way for hundreds of years. We’ve had no time to get used to the new normal. It doesn’t feel like anything yet.

I fear by the time we feel it it will be far too late, by design.

One more bingeable, Blue Lights from BBC on HBO Max. I love police dramas, esp British ones. I watched Peaky Blinders earlier this year and The Fall, another British crime drama, and, amazingly they all take place in Belfast, believe it or not, and don't count the number of times people say "wee" in the darndest places in BBC Belfast crime dramas. Do Brits really say wee all the time? How did I not see that coming.

Internet was out at the house all day. Luckily it was one of the most perfect days to spend outside. In the meantime, I highly recommend the Floodlines serial podcast from the Atlantic. It's bingeable in an afternoon, tells an interesting story of Katrina and New Orleans. The interview with Brownie is cringe-worthy not binge-worthy, I skipped over it.

I had an RSS-specific blog starting in May 2004. I had forgotten about it. Lots of stuff here, I just read through a few months.

There's a difference between reading a site in a web browser and it being part of the web. As it turns out what became Web 2.0, all built as silos, could more accurately be called Anti-web 2.0. Underneath all the silos, the heart of the web is still beating. Ready for us to build on it again.

An archive of the previous version, built around GitHub.

I did a rewrite of the FeedCorps page in FeedLand. You get to it through the Reading Lists sub-menu of the Tools menu. There are three lists in the new version. A lot were false starts, they didn't make the cut. I'm always adding feeds to my blogroll and news.scripting.com. Unfortunately I can't say the same for podcasts, which are not hooked up to my podcast app. I really want a hot connection there. We'll get there. The reading lists feature is going to play a big role going forward in the open social web we're building. BTW, I really like the name FeedCorps. I haven't talked about it very much. It's a cause, like peace or freedom. Open those suckas up. Feeds all the way babe.

A few days ago I worked with ChatGPT to generate an RSS feed of news that interests me. Here's a writeup with a place to comment and perhaps to collaborate on doing this for real. ChatGPT has real limits. This has to be done off on the side. It certainly could be done with their API. I'm head-down on other projects and can't do it myself but as I explain in the writeup, it would plug in beautifully to stuff I'm doing and it would all be open, so a new kind of feed reader is possible. And we could find news from other bloggers that the journalists aren't reporting on, the same way we relied on blogs in the early days to learn about what was going on on the web. It's time to do that again.

Back in the beginning I wanted the web to be like Harvard. It's one of the reasons I went there as a research fellow in 2003. I wasn't satisfied with the web, the density of minds wasn't up to my expectations, so I thought if I brought the web to the minds, that might work ...

Yesterday I wrote a quick review of ChatGPT 5, after trying a simple programming exercise with it. It was an awful collaboration because it lied to me about its capabilities, leading me to develop a feature in my software to support the capability that it later admitted that...

That said, it got pretty far toward solving the problem I asked it to work on. Here's a demo of a page it put together for me of the top 25 articles in US news.

ChatGPT is even more of a bastard than 4.

New version of feedlandSocket. It's now an NPM package you can include in Node projects. The demo is more useful, and there's a video of what it looks like as it scrolls through the JavaScript console. WebSockets + feeds. A fairly important component of an open social web system.

A summary of recent work via my WordLand blog.

This is a picture of my dear departed Uncle Vava taken in the early 1970s in my parents' house in Flushing. It just showed up in my On This Day list on Facebook, thought it belongs on the blog too. .

I recorded a good podcast yesterday about how I develop new stuff like podcasting, and how it only works if there isn't a huge dominant platform vendor to FUD the project. That's why RSS worked, sort of -- we did get FUDded by the RDF folk, who had a few famous people on thei...

I wanted to put together a demo of a very simple but interesting Node.js app, so I hooked up with replit, and was surprised to find out that it's now an AI bot. But when I asked it to make a sandbox for this app, which is in a repo on GitHub, rather than take the direct route, and run the demo.js app (which is what I asked it to do), it concocted a pointless user interface, that hid all the interesting bits. This was a demo for programmers for crying out loud. I want to show them the machinery in motion. I'm going to try again today.

Perspective: I view WordPress as if it's my own product.

I added two new subscription lists to lists.opml.org and it's better organized and more concise.

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!