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And now would be a great time to put together a group of NY-metro sports bloggers into a nice publication. There's real money in sports in the city.
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The NYT used to have a sports section, now when you click a link in their Sports feed it asks for more money. And they don’t appear to have specific coverage for NY sports teams. They’re the Google of news. We need an EZ-Pass for News to route around their dominance.
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It's remarkable how quickly this is happening, and not surprising because ChatGPT is such a compelling app, and it's doubly-so when applied to our own writing. But so far there's one glaring omission, these bots don't know where my blog is. Who is going to fill that gap, not with an experiment, but with something up to par at least with the way Bard understands Gmail, which is still pretty simple, but I imagine it's only going to get better, quickly.
This NYT article (no paywall) is a summary of how tech is moving quickly to bring ChatGPT-like functionality to people's content, through email and cloud-based documents.
It's remarkable how quickly this is happening, and not surprising because ChatGPT is such a compelling app, and it's doubly-so when applied to our own writing. But so far there's one glaring omission, these bots don't know where my blog is. Who is going to fill that gap, not with an experiment, but with something up to par at least with the way Bard understands Gmail, which is still pretty simple, but I imagine it's only going to get better, quickly.
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BTW, I had to try the Bard feature that lets you ask questions about your Gmail. As you might imagine there's some very personal stuff in there. As a matter of policy I do not write about that kind of stuff on my blog, but mama mia it's pretty amazing what it will report on.
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We need a Node.js package that lets you add the contents of a file to the ChatGPT database, along with a URL where the content of that file can be found on the web. It has to be that simple. Based on what Google announced yesterday, and what Facebook is likely to announce this week, it's clear that the big tech companies are only going to allow you to access your data if it's stored in their silos. We need something just as powerful and easy that works with content on the open web.
We need a Node.js package that lets you add the contents of a file to the ChatGPT database, along with a URL where the content of that file can be found on the web. It has to be that simple. Based on what Google announced yesterday, and what Facebook is likely to announce this week, it's clear that the big tech companies are only going to allow you to access your data if it's stored in their silos. We need something just as powerful and easy that works with content on the open web.
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If anyone from MacArthur or Knight is tuned in, here's an idea. Help us get an EZ-Pass for News going. It's a bootstrap. If there were incentives. If it were seen as a good cause. It could increase the fluidity of news around the country and world by an order of magnitude. That can't help but increase cash flow through news orgs. But more importantly it give us more access to ideas that don't come from the NYT et al. Might be a nice way to boost all the local news orgs being supported by the $500 million fund.
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Let's mark this line clearly. Talk like that is full of alarm for Jewish people, esp those raised by people who survived the last holocaust. If this doesn't stop you in your tracks, then you probably won't notice when they start calling us vermin, restricting our movement, take our property, move us to ghettos and then systematically incinerate us the way you would rid yourself of an infestation. You know the old story about the frog boiling in water. We all are on that path. This was always where Make America Great Again was going, an America with all the Jews dead. That this isn't Story One on every front page and newscast says everything you need to know about how journalism is failing us.
Yesterday the "former president" as he's referred to on TV, or Mr President on NBC, shared a post that said Jewish liberals are destroying America.
Let's mark this line clearly. Talk like that is full of alarm for Jewish people, esp those raised by people who survived the last holocaust. If this doesn't stop you in your tracks, then you probably won't notice when they start calling us vermin, restricting our movement, take our property, move us to ghettos and then systematically incinerate us the way you would rid yourself of an infestation. You know the old story about the frog boiling in water. We all are on that path. This was always where Make America Great Again was going, an America with all the Jews dead. That this isn't Story One on every front page and newscast says everything you need to know about how journalism is failing us.
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I'm not sure spending $500 million to support local journalism will do more than buy a little time for a system that isn't working.
I've always felt the money would be better spent in teaching anyone who wants to learn the basic skills and practices of journalism, so that lots of approaches are possible. Sources go direct, ie blogging. I have long advocated that a semester of journalism should be encouraged or required for a university degree. What's the point of educating a mind if that mind doesn't know how to share the knowledge with others? My blogger colors are showing here. I still believe the people are our best hope. And I think journalism failed and propping it up will help keep reporters employed a little longer, but I don't think it will create a foundation that can be built on. We will still have an urgent need for news we can trust.Textcasting revisited
Textcasting applies the philosophy of podcasting to text.
It also describes what we should have done when Twitter first came along, what I would have done if I were them. We would have had a much different situation now.
Textcasting also says that all the tribulations of Activitypub aren't necessary. No one has bothered to think this through at the top level, everyone is working in niches, not really aware of what anyone else is doing.
Journalism also refused to look. So they were guided into a gulag by Twitter and now they don't like it. If anyone had thought through where they were going, that would have led to textcasting too. They should have owned the new news environment, instead they and we were controlled by it.
The thing that keeps me focused is writers. It's all about writers, what tools they need to think and collaborate, without boundaries.
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I'd like to have a chat with the secret unaccountable person who is breaking the web at Google. How about running your ideas past me before you break the web. Would that be okay?
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BTW, are you seriously telling me "security" couldn't have been added to the web without breaking every single freaking link?
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A screen shot of what links.scripting.com looked like. I like to do this when domains move, when I think of it, so at least the image of the previous site is maintained.
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Bryce Glass pointed out that links.scripting.com hasn't updated since June 5. I quickly pointed it at news.scripting.com, but that isn't the correct place to link to. Back in a minute or two.
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Yet another time Google pulled the rug out from under bloggers, acting as the defacto owner of the web. To big tech companies we just don't exist, probably because to news orgs we don't exist either. Not being able to tell where your stuff is being discussed means you can't learn or persuade. Maybe we should have a human network that manages to get links back to the blogger?
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It's that time of year when I get into MLB, and unfortunately the Mets aren't in the race this year. Probably won't root for anyone, but I really like watching the game this time of year. For now I'm watching the Mets, it's relaxing with absolutely nothing at stake. Except I can't believe they're thinking about not signing Pete Alonso. A homegrown star. The rarest thing these days in NY baseball.
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Update: It seems like this change in Chrome in 2020 is at the root of this new behavior. Something that sounds so esoteric is actually removing an important feature of the web, and it got little or no notice.
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Imagine a ChatGPT-like bug reporting system, where the user reports a bug via chat, which asks follow-up questions to determine if it's a software error, and determines reproducible steps before a developer even sees the report. One of the most frustrating things in the life of a developer who cares about users are vague reports like "It doesn't work, what did I do wrong?" The chatbot has infinite, inhuman patience.
Imagine a ChatGPT-like bug reporting system, where the user reports a bug via chat, which asks follow-up questions to determine if it's a software error, and determines reproducible steps before a developer even sees the report. One of the most frustrating things in the life of a developer who cares about users are vague reports like "It doesn't work, what did I do wrong?" The chatbot has infinite, inhuman patience.
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I'm getting email saying ChatGPT got some data wrong in the movie report I asked for, but that isn't what's interesting. I'm sure they'll fix that stuff. What's impressive is the language I was able to use to specify the query.
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I'm sure there's a privacy reason for this. Perhaps if you were clicking a link from a porn site to a tech blog, you might not want the site to know where you came from, esp if the destination site is Facebook? Not sure. I've been noticing this for a long time, but only yesterday took the time to rule out a bug in my code.
It seems like HTTP requests these days, generally, don't come with a referer header? It's a shame because if something you wrote is getting a lot of hits you can't tell where they're coming from.
I'm sure there's a privacy reason for this. Perhaps if you were clicking a link from a porn site to a tech blog, you might not want the site to know where you came from, esp if the destination site is Facebook? Not sure. I've been noticing this for a long time, but only yesterday took the time to rule out a bug in my code.
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They don't try to report news on NPR. Bending over backwards to treat Republican mockery of legislative processes as legit. I'm sure when they talk about the events they cover privately they tell each other the truth. But not to their listeners. Why bother.
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Imagine a DNS utility that you could converse with as you do with ChatGPT.
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There's a lot of power and ownership that comes from having the dominant web browser.
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I asked ChatGPT to write SQL code that would generate the table of actors and awards I spec'd last week. "Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture."
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It's provably faster, and it makes it possible to build bigger machines that do more. The challenge of software development is to factor and factor so you can add another story to the skyscraper that your product has become. Eventually you have to stop building, one mind can't comprehend that much. Better tools makes it possible to build and manage more complex machines. I have no idea what's around the corner in software development when we can rely on cyber-minds to keep track of complexity for us. We'll have to develop new modes of communication between the human and computer brains, and I seriously doubt if it'll involve implants, more likely it'll happen first when we invent new language. And each of us should be able to create our own. At some point we'll realize we aren't even making sounds. It'll have sensors that learn how our bodies change when we have certain ideas. Who knows. But what possibilities!
I use interactive debuggers as programming tools, not in just in place of console.log statements.
It's provably faster, and it makes it possible to build bigger machines that do more. The challenge of software development is to factor and factor so you can add another story to the skyscraper that your product has become. Eventually you have to stop building, one mind can't comprehend that much. Better tools makes it possible to build and manage more complex machines. I have no idea what's around the corner in software development when we can rely on cyber-minds to keep track of complexity for us. We'll have to develop new modes of communication between the human and computer brains, and I seriously doubt if it'll involve implants, more likely it'll happen first when we invent new language. And each of us should be able to create our own. At some point we'll realize we aren't even making sounds. It'll have sensors that learn how our bodies change when we have certain ideas. Who knows. But what possibilities!
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Noted that WordPress blogs can now peer with Mastodon and other ActivityPub nodes. Suppose I have a WordPress site and my username is scripting. What address would you follow in Mastodon?
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One of the cool things about this blog is that I got to write about these things when they were new, and now that they've been around quite a long time, in tech industry terms, I get to write about them again.
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I have a few virtual servers at Digital Ocean, and two of them are running Caddy, so the sites hosted on these machines are HTTPS not HTTP. Caddy is the best. You install it, configure it and that's it. It takes care of all the michegas with the EFF, makes them completely invisible.
Also makes it possible to switch thank goodness, I didn't miss that the EFF built themselves into the new system, not by force exactly, but by default. Heh. They get a lot of free marketing. Anyway, the fact that Caddy exists means that Amazon S3 could offer HTTPS access to everything I store there without me having to do anything but check a box in a dialog somewhere. So why don't they do it, make HTTPS zero cost to implement and maintain. They could even charge extra. It's kind of perfect, they know who I am better than anyone. We could make HTTPS disappear, which imho would be a good thing.
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Not sure I've ever written about this. At the time we were finishing up Radio UserLand, in either 2001 or 2002 (there were two big releases). I wanted a way to export the user's feed list so people could use the same list in another reader. This one decision is why there are so many feed readers imho. Because we offered no lock-in as a key feature, everyone else including Google had to do it with their products. Users had the expectation of data portability, so it's in the DNA of feed readers. Maybe we would have dominated the market with Radio if we didn't export the feed list, it was for a while the only feed reader, but more likely Google would have entered and clobbered us, users wouldn't have been able to use both products, or easily move on after Reader shut down. Anyway, why OPML? First, we had it around, it was new, I wanted people to use it, and I also wanted to use the outliner to edit my subscription lists. JSON didn't exist as an option at the time. And using RSS for that seemed confusing and not right. RSS is a syndication format, representing a flow of information, where OPML represents a list that evolves, but each item has permanence. It's static where RSS is dynamic. It's like the difference between a podcast and an album of music. You listen to a podcast once and it's gone, you may listen to an album many times over decades. Fundamentally different kinds of data, with different needs in how they evolve, and thus the format you use to represent it. Yes we could have shoehorned feed lists into RSS, but 20 years later I'm glad we didn't.
I saw a thread somewhere about why 
