FeedCity

So far Gemini has done the best job of emulating my coding style. Here's an example. I didn't have to instruct it in how to do it, it figured it out. Impressive. I've spent a lot of time trying and failing to get Claude and ChatGPT to work the way I work. It makes a big difference, because if I want to try out something they've offered, I have to spend time doing grunt work to get it so I can read it and understand what they're doing.

I once owned a few acres of land that had some old trees on it. I sat under one of the trees on a lovely afternoon, and thought of the tree "I own you." The tree formed a thought that somehow I could tune into. "I was here long before you were born and I will be here long after you die." I didn't see it exactly as a response to my claim of ownership. But it sure did put things in perspective!

PS: I wrote that paragraph in 2011.

When a friend discovers a new product of mine and says the world owes Dave for being such a great guy, I wish they'd skip that part, and follow what we're doing. Get in the loop. Software isn't a thing, it isn't finished, it's a process as it gets invented by the users. It'...

It's about time WordLand had a Bluesky account.

When a friend discovers a new product of mine and says the world owes Dave for being such a great guy, I wish they'd skip that part, and follow what we're doing here. Get in the loop. Software isn't a thing, it isn't finished, it's a process as it gets invented by the users. ...

Someday I'll be able to point ChatGPT at the home page for writing about WordLand, and tell it to read every page that's linked to it, and from that put together a well-organized book about WordLand. Maybe sometime next year perhaps?? I used that as a prompt, to see what ChatGPT would say.

We lived for the first years of my life in Jackson Heights, which is probably, today, the most culturally diverse place in the world. In the 1960s it was a white neighborhood that was adjacent to a black neighborhood, Corona. They paired our elementary schools when I was in ...

I have been writing the colorful saga of my sad depressed programmer friend on Facebook, and it was getting some interest from friends until I moved it into a group and now no one reads it, which makes me sad and depressed too because the story of my programmer friend took an interesting turn after he maxed out on space, got a call from the NBA commisioner asking if he would mind officiating the Knicks two playoff games in Boston this last week. My friend, was of course quite sad and depressed, but he was also exhausted and bored, so he said yes. Here he is before the first of two games, which partially thanks to his officiating were near-blowouts for the Celtics, and thus the Knicks are up 2-0 heading into tomorrow's game in New York.

A big update for Bookmarks in the latest release of WordLand.

I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible to know.

Fight Club for Tech was a pet idea until I screwed something up and seemed to have lost control of it, but I just found it in the list of my WordPress sites, so I guess I can post to it again?

I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible

We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.

Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The great thing about sports is that a lowly software developer can be richer than a fantastically rich team owner, if the developer's team is the Knicks.

I have to say the latest Baseline theme looks great! Here's a blog post I just wrote, in the WordLand editor, and the writing experience was excellent. It took a long time and a lot of work to get it there, but it is there now. But as the post says, it's not just a blog pos...

Also, I applied the new Baseline theme to my daveverse site, the one I use to test stuff in WordLand, and occasionally write something with a bit of lasting value. As a result it got a new domain, daveverse.org. We're going to offer the Baseline theme for others to use after a bit more testing and refining. But it's getting close. It seems like it's the last big thing on the agenda, but something else will probably pop up. Praise Murphy.

Changes coming to Bookmarks in next WordLand release. I cut it back to work exactly like bookmarks in Drummer. I have to do a bit more work before it's ready to release, probably tomorrow.

I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like guilded age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."

New feature: How to handle an empty site list.

The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so f...

There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser.

I want the EV's they're getting in China. Because we've got these stupid trade barriers we can't get the latest tech. Imagine in say 1984 you were a developer outside the US and you couldn't get a Mac. Then, perhaps Trump's tariff might have a slight chance of working. Now we're on the outside looking in.

When I did the rewrite of the nightly mail app, I didn't convert the app that builds the nightly RSS feed of the mail page. Wasn't sure if anyone was using it. I heard from a reader who missed it, so I got it running, knock wood, Murphy-willing.

Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing.

I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them.

Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).

Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.

Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof.

I wonder if people can read those.

Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand. Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the Syst...

I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release, there comes a point in developing product that it may not be perfect for everyone or for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. There's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on. So I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of my friends, in this context products that use open formats for interop.

If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client.

ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I w...