Podcast: There's no journalism about the new things ChatGPT makes possible. Every day I'm trying to do it myself and encourage others to as well. Explain things we can do now that weren't approachable before. I did a 15 minute report about this just now. I had to debug a complicated new configuration, setting up a new server with new code on both ends to implement a secure websocket connection. I've done it a dozen times, and you always make at least one mistake, and have to find it, and you need a checklist to go through, systematically, to find the problem, and it's really cool that ChatGPT can synthesize the checklist and give you instructions on tools that make it easy. There could never be anything like this on a Google/Stack Exchange type support system. It simply wasn't possible a year ago. We really need this story to get out too, but now it's all about how AI is a hoax. It is not. Yes Silicon Valley is run by monsters, doing basically the best they can. Riding a wave like this is thrilling but also you can't win on a personal level these days. It used to be the other way, you couldn't lose. They put the czars of tech on the covers of magazines and praised them as genius, godlike humans living at a much more elevated level than all of us schnooks, if you were one of the blessed. And always ignored are the freaking users, which is where the actual revolution is taking place. Too much work for the journalists, I guess? I would think if you were reporting in a time when new uses of technology are being discovered daily, real ones, transformative ones, you'd want to be in on that story. Nope I guess you don't get a Pulitzer these days for reporting news, just for finding hypocrisy, which is always in great supply, real or imagined. 😄#
As you may know, over the years I extend RSS by adding elements to the source namespace. The latest is source:self whose value is the canonical URL for the feed. This was a useful addition in Atom, which I supported in reallySimple in 2022, and I wanted to include the value without having to add another namespace to my feed and feeds produced by my products, so reallySimple now supports both. Small move forward for interop. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)