Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
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Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to be a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned.
I needed an updated bio for a conference in October.
Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.
I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed.
Yesterday I introduced a new feed for great art, 24 times a day. Every hour on the hour.
Today, a version of that feed provides one work of art each day, at midnight, Eastern.
Why I did this feed. I'm crafting a new information product, and I want to include a random work of art but not every hour, once a day is enough. I thought it was worth a detour to make the feed that I wanted.
The first work of art in the feed on its inaugural issue was The Countess from Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526. It was chosen at random from a collection of 42,473 works of art.
The Countess, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526.Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.
There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share.
Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.
Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.
I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now.
A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.
Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user.
With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator.
I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.
I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.
Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.
Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example out there to crib from.
A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.
I am totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s. I might have one of the largest codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week?
A list of ten random country names
Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way.