The new version of news.scripting.com is up. It's been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it's faster. And if you poke around you'll find some new stuff. There's an About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don't doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄#BTW, in case you're wondering where "still diggin!" came from -- here's the deal. I have a feeling that when I develop software it's a lot like digging a hole and then starting another, and another and using the dirt from a new hole to fill in the old holes. At any time there's more or less a constant amount of dirt and holes. It seems futile at first look, and second looks and third looks, but we do eventually get somewhere, or so we hope, maybe. It's like "even worse than it appears." Still diggin is meant to say we know it's really futile, you don't have to point that out, we never actually go anywhere or do anything, but we feel somehow that next time it really will work. It's a Vonnegut-like or Deadhead-like philosophy, which is also very Postel-like. In other words, realistic. #
Emily Nunn: "I don’t understand how all the outcry about their bizarre and defensive political coverage and the scary effect it can have on the election is not a major investigative story being written by other journalists. Not some fancy media critic opinion or an editorial. A real report, taking defensiveness out of it and applying accountability." A regular reader of this blog will know how totally I agree with this. But oddly when I agreed with her, perhaps a little to strongly for her liking, she accused me of being a MAGA. It's so totally not true, and typical of reporters, to use an ad hominem to not have to listen to a non-journalist opinion about journalism. #I have been a reader of the NYT since I was a small child. I wanted to be a writer like Russell Baker. I was quoted by William Safire in an op-ed. I have done some of the most successful work of my career with the NYT. I love journalism like I love the Mets. I don't expect them to do great things every season, but I do hope for a 1969 or 1986 every once in a while. These days I don't have much hope for the NYT returning to its former glory. I also wonder if they ever really were that great, that maybe I was just a naive young hero-seeker, growing up in Queens in the 1960s. We all have to work together to dig out of the hole we're in. And that means reporters have to start looking at themselves, and they have to listen to us, the people who care about the job that we need journalism to do, that it isn't doing. #
- All these different networks, but it's all the same kind of writing. #
- I just pasted a link to a Substack post into a Threads document. #
- It would make so much sense if the document itself was readable right there, wouldn't it?#
- Is the concept of a "web page" all that valuable?#
- Imagine if each note was a node. #
- People learn to make art by studying previous artists. Would we want it any other way? #
- Imagine if everyone had to reinvent everything that anyone had ever invented just to make something new. #
- There is a lot of that in software, people won't put in an API so you have to rebuild the whole house just to get a window. #
- We can make progress when people don't try to lock up their ideas. #
- Individuals live just a short time, we can't do that much in a lifetime, but we are an amazing species, because we leave behind what we learn and we build. #
- So why shouldn't our machines be able to learn too? They already can do things vastly more complex than we can. We've invented a huge lever. #
- Science fiction tells us that we will lose control and be enslaved by our machines. I love those stories, like the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica. But those are stories, they didn't happen. The future is rarely so predictable. Things interact in unforseeable ways. #
- We're at dead-ends in climate and government. We need to make radical changes, and a fresh invention as radically progressive as any that has come before is now in our hands. #
- PS: I wrote the words, ChatGPT did the images. #
