Like cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I think we all know which kind of weird the Repubs are.

Here's a perfect illustration how ChatGPT can improve customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier for me to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system. I tried calling 1-800-CALL-APPLE and talked to a human who was very nice, but couldn't find anything in her manual about refusing delivery.

Is there anyone here within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?

I don't when technology moves backwards.

I'm always trying to push it the other way.

It's like being a ball player wanting to win a game.

Or a musician wanting to record a hit.

A VC wanting a 10x return.

A diplomat achieving growth and peace.

Before Twitter broke the API, it used to be a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to automatically (those are Bluesky, Masto, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing.

Braintrust query: Every day a web page opens in Chrome from a plugin that asks me to buy a subscription. I don't know what the software is, I gather that it's related to a debugger I use for Node.js apps. I would like to block it from doing this, but I don't see an easy way to tell Chrome to not display pages from this site. Any suggestions?

I signed up for White Dudes for Harris, but I did it reluctantly. Would have enthusiastically joined a Men for Harris group. Tech for Harris. New York for Harris. How about Americans for Harris. Voters for Harris.

Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after 27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."

John Batelle had an interesting observation about this yesterday, that SearchGPT is a clever way to get news orgs to think about ChatGPT in a different, less threatening way. They want to be in a search engine index (that's called SEO) where they want to be paid to be part of a chatbot. There really isn't a line there, in fact. That's what SearchGPT makes obvious. I for one, want all my stuff in their index so I can find out wtf I've been writing about here for almost 30 freaking years! 😄

Referrer logs and webmentions may be about to become obsolete with the advent of SearchGPT, and presumably Google's AI and search facilities are also about to merge. Here's the deal. When I write a blog post and want to know if anyone has mentioned it, I will simply be able to ask ChatGPT, "Have any sites mentioned, with or without links, the story I wrote yesterday entitled "Unix-like things" and if so please provide a title, synopsis and link, if available, so I can read the full text." I'm sure that will be appropriately shortened, or perhaps turned into something like the referre lists of today. This is the kind of thing the network can do for us automatically.

On this day in 2004, I did podcast interviews with Don Means of Meetup and Patty Wetterling of Minnesota at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. For both, I did the interview with Natasha Celine of the Pacific Views blog. The next podcast won't be until August 15. I think Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor are on this one, and if so for sure we'll be talking about the podcasting bootstrap which at this point appears to be underway. Not sure if anyone as ever gone down this path in the last 20 years because, when I do the searches to find links to sites and people, I don't see any mention of this stuff in the current day, although now there will be (here on my blog). Here's the feed of ancient podcast podcast review. You can find the reverse chronologic list of the whole series on morningcoffeenotes.com.

Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.

On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing.

Somehow it's up to the Harris campaign to get the Trumps to have a normal American presidential campaign, not a prelude to a second attempted coup, which is what the Trumps are doing. I can see the op-ed they run in September saying that it's Harris's fault that the Trumps a...

I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully.

In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. It's just what I wanted.

It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exactly where I want it.

BTW, I think the files are smaller?

Here's a screen shot.

I sent a tweet to Eric Raymond, lightly edited here, basically following up on a thread that started in 2001. It's good to see you tweeting. A long time ago you said XML-RPC, something I worked on, is Unix-like. XML-RPC, in particular, is very much in the Unix spirit. It'...

Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?

We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform.

Biden's speech might turn out to be a Gettysburg type speech. We hope it does. We have a huge fork in the road, one way -- goodbye USA, the other way 00 USA stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty and he's old and tired and fat and very bad. You have to work really hard not to see that.

Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing tools is a waste. I have to do it because there are huge holes in the web as a development platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new stacks incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create any new user experiences. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about the things they don't care about.

I am optimistic that Trump is headed for the graveyard of history, shortly. First time I've felt like this in a long time.

When (if) that happens, we can use Cory Doctorow's excellent concept enshitification to describe what he did to the American political system.

He also stress tested it, and we would be the greatest fools imaginable if we didn't add some seriously enforceable guardrails to prevent this kind of attack happening in the future. Might work out well to have a lawyer in the White House.

I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around.

JD goes as a childless cat lady in the krewe Cretins of Trumpland.

I almost used enshitification in a post yesterday.

It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.

Pretty remarkable how the bots on Twitter have become so abusive. Makes the idea of discourse there pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.

Is Reddit now only available on Google search?

Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press.

How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for.

All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.