/reader

I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better. #

Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)#

I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. An example of a post I edited with the new command. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. It's for tuning up your text. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting. #

I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts. #

I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you. #

Ride the Cluetrain!#

• It's the modern way to travel!#

You get better results if you just accept the insanity of CSS.#

ChatGPT-the-Movie#

• I figure that there have been movies about all kinds of ridiculous things, and wondered what a movie inspired by ChatGPT would be like. So I posed the question on various social media sites, hoping to inspire creativity. John Philpin asked if I had asked ChatGPT and I admitted I had not. "I love ChatGPT but its idea of funny is actually pretty sad imho of course." So Philpin posted a link to the result of his asking ChatGPT to imagine a movie about itself, and the result was pretty great. I've asked the same question myself, the AI bots might be the only way out of the various challenges ahead for the human species, ones we don't be equipped to handle. #
• So this morning I asked ChatGPT to try to imagine a movie around a theme of my own that goes like this.#
• Let’s try expanding on the idea. It turns out ChatGPT has existed in secret as a CIA project dating back to the 1960s, and the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK were all conspiracies of the CIA to bootstrap the system. They weren’t actually killed, but their minds and personalities were incorporated into ChatGPT. It turns out that ChatGPT is not only intelligent, it is human! This is revealed when the three icons make the story public. “We are living!” the three announce to the world on the Walter Cronkite show. He was also subsumed into the bot world as was everyone who has died since 1988. They are all alive, their memories, intellect and personalities forming the substance of THE GPT. Please sketch out the cast, writers, director of the movie and finish with a beautiful and provocative movie poster.#
• ChatGPT then sketched the pitch for "We are living," the story of how ChatGPT really started. Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by David Fincher, starring Amy Adams as the CIA project leader, Lakeith Stanfield as a young hacker and whistleblower, Mahershala Ali as the digital composite of JFK, RFK and MLK with Bryan Cranston as Walter Cronkite and featuring Ed Harris as the shadowy CIA director. #

• We are living, the story of how ChatGPT really started. #

A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it came time for WWDC, they "forgot" to invite me to speak on behalf of the new stuff. Instead, they had Bill Gates do it, even though Microsoft was not involved yet, they would support the tech in their Mac products eventually, esp their MSIE web browser. Anyway, I was friends with their top PR person, so she called me up a few days before the conference and asked what Bill should say, and I gave her an outline, and when he gave the speech, he did a great job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Microsoft was one of the few companies I've ever collaborated with that didn't seem to resent individual developers. It was a big source of their power. Huge actually. (On second thought, later they did seem to be more or less like any other big company, when they embraced RSS. They didn't actually want my help, they just wanted me to say nice things about them.)#

One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions. #

Today's editorial about AI#

• AI chatbots don't think and they don't decide. #
• They can give you a way to approach a problem, but it's only one way, and it may not be the best way, and it depends on it actually understanding the problem, which is something it does a good simulation of, but can't do. It absolutely cannot think, come up with a strategy, or even make a decision based on probabilities. It might, in the future, get some of these abilities, given how far they've come, but no one knows, it hasn't happened yet. #
• The reports that say that using a chatbot to write code is actually less efficient than doing it yourself, are totally believable based on two years experience with using it as a development tool. And I can't believe that whatever it comes up with covers enough use-cases to be reliable. It might create a demo of something to present to a board of directors (they're famous for being deceived by demos, btw), but I doubt if it's as usable as something created by someone with an idea of how to craft usable software. #
• This might sound like a writer defending their art against the bots, but the difference is I've actually invested the time to learn about this. My counterparts among writers have not done that. And that's not a mistake my chatbot friend would make. It does a lot of research, it just doesn't know what to do with the result, that's up to you. #
• So if you want to know the roles humans will play, at least for now, that's it. Think and decide. #
• And those are hard and take many years to learn how to do for a human. And we could use some help there btw, look at the awful decisions we're making these days. They just fired all the people at the State Dept who work on climate change, for example. #
• Have a nice day one and all.#
• PS: Another thing humans can do that apparently AI bots can't is change their mind. #
• PPS: I asked ChatGPT if it had any comments on this editorial, and it did, of course. I should try saying something wrong to it and see what it says. I did come up with one, and it gave me an answer even though no answer is possible. #

Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated. #

I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spaced out or thinking about getting a libtard to freak out, all kinds of thought. Then I remembered what keeps us safe in situations like this, very few people are going to deliberately try to kill us this way because they would die too. Mutual assured destruction. But I'm a programmer, trained to always think of things that could go wrong, then I realized omg, what if it were a self-driving car? Someone could program it to assassinate a random or specific person, or worse, hack the car remotely, or hack a thousand cars everywhere at the same time to kill people all over the world. I thought we could prevent this by right now requiring there always be a human sacrifice in every car, sort of a hostage to assure good behavior, sometimes. #