To my friends who use Drummer to blog, and have a Radio3 linkblog, we now have a way for you to use FeedLand as a linkblogging tool. #
I often forget to be blown away by how much house you can get for how little in the Hudson Valley. I like this location, real close to the river, and Saugerties is a great town, small, quiet, but has everything you need right there. And not as sprawling as Kingston. Still old, and charming. #
I remember when I was a Comp Sci student at UW taking the Compiler Design class, CS701. It was the class that weeded out those who would get graduate degrees from those who would not. The class project was to write a compiler for an Algol-like language that the professor desgined. He gave us a set of test apps that we had to compile and run correctly. I didn't get it. I thought code generation was like a magic box. Somehow the machine had a copy of every program you could write, and when it saw you were asking for that one, it would just spit out the code. Knowing what I know now, this was a ludicrous idea, but it's the best your mind can do when you just don't get it. Then there was the moment when I did get it. I started writing a code generator for a while loop, and plugged it into the compiler-compiler, and saw what it generated worked. From that point on, it was just writing code. Same thing with the web. I thought of big data centers, until I visited one of the most popular sites on the web, IUMA, and found it was just an old Sun terminal and a pizza box computer, sitting on the floor in a random dusty one-room office in Santa Cruz. That's it? I couldn't believe it. So I'm sure there's a gestalt like that for ChatGPT. Behind the magic is a bit of software, as magical (or not) as my compiler, or the pathetic Santa Cruz machine with the huge net presence. I'm sure there's something very mundane behind the curtain, but for now I love the magic of it and I don't believe the explanations that say it's stupid. It feels really smart to me. #Another ChatGPT use-case. There's an open source package called medium-editor that I use to edit text in most of my products. I believe it's popular, but because of its name, it can be hard to use a search engine to find technical information about it. I wanted to make an instance of the editor the focus by default when its created. I asked ChatGPT how to do it, and it gave me fantastic docs, because it could sort out what Google simply can't. Incredibly useful. It will, if it works, result in a product that "feels good" -- people probably won't even notice that it did anything unusual. This is what make software excellent. (Update: Still scratching my head over this.)#
This might be my favorite Stones song because the lead singer is Keith Richards, but he gets a bunch of help from Mick Jagger. It's like magic. Perfect music for 4/20. Always took candy from strangers. Don't want to end up like papa working for the boss every night and day. I need love to keep me happy.#
But then there's Psycho Killer, with its relentless beat. You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.#
One more. "Still crazy after all these years." My new anthem. Goes with even worse than it appears.#