If podcasting had a marketing team behind it, we'd run a campaign that says "It's not podcasting if you don't have choice." If you have to use Apple, Audible, Spotify or Google to listen to something, that's nice, hope it's good for you, but folks that is not a podcast. Podcasts give you the listener all the power. If you give it up it'll all be Disneyfied before too long. It pisses me off that Amazon Music sends me messages about all the new "podcasts" they have. I mutter under my breath when I hear this, some expletive I'd rather not repeat. Amazon, the users know that podcasting == user choice, and they hate you just a little every time you lie about it. Find another term you like and use that. You have the money to do the marketing. Come on, just once play fair. You'll be surprised how good it feels, and I wouldn't be surprised if the users reward you for it. #

What got me spinning was listening to Rachel Maddow advertise her podcast at the beginning of her show last night. You can get the podcast for free, she says, or if you want no ads, you can pay some money and get it from Apple. What Apple is selling there, and Maddow is going along with, is not a freaking podcast and by calling it one they undermine a great medium. I understand why Maddow might not care, she makes millions from a medium that doesn't give users much choice (ie MSNBC) so why should she care about podcasting, which does. #

The test for whether it's a podcast or not is if they say you can get it "Wherever you get your podcasts." If they can say that, it's a podcast. If you have to get it from Apple or YouTube or whoever, it's not a podcast. That's the rule.#

It’s too bad when I post something positive about ChatGPT, which I do because journalists are dumping on it based on not using it but asking it gotcha questions, which seems to be all they know how to do, the trolls show up, asking if we’ve read this or that journalism article. On Facebook, I delete the comments and change the permissions to only allow friends to comment. The journalists are wrong about ChatGPT. I solve problems with it. It guides me through difficult programming situations, esp around convoluted designs like CSS and JavaScript. It knows all of it. The only times it hallucinates (and I know it's doing it btw, I'm not stupid) is when there is not enough info on the web to give an answer. It would be nice if it just said "I don't know" but it's early, and they haven't figured out how to do that yet. The journalists have no sense of wonder I guess, or they never thought to use it in their jobs. I can't wait for the first aha! from a journalist -- who will say this: "Aha! Now I see what this is for and it's freaking lovely." But they've decided it sucks and that's that. Too bad, we're going on without them. And thanks to the good moderation tools we can keep the turd-droppers from totally screwing it up. #

In other words the designers of CSS and JavaScript and probably every other technology everyone uses had no idea what actual developers were doing with their committee-designed creation. They made mistakes and piled them on each other, fixing old mistakes with new mistakes. After 30 years of evolving in this convoluted way, if you want to create useful software, you have to either master all of it (and no one has) or pay $20 a month to OpenAI so you can use it to navigate the awful hairball that the web platform has become. Where we only have a sliver of knowledge as humans, the machine knows all of it. And that's just programming. I'm just guessing that everything is that way. You know the part in The Matrix Reloaded where we're told no one knows how the technology works. That's where we are now. Spend your whole life using the stuff and you still only know a tiny fraction of what you need to make good software. We needed what ChatGPT does, but we didn't know we needed it. That's where we are now, and the journos are sitting on the sidelines hurling spitballs at it. #