Greetings from the Catskills where it's a bright early summer day. #
Podcast: Why the mechanism behind ChatGPT doesn't matter. As usual I ramble all over the place, but hopefully this illuminates and perhaps entertains. 15 minutes.#
The real story of RSS is that in a moment when the NYT had a spirit of adventure, they backed RSS and as a result news adopted a technology that was pioneered by bloggers, not the tech industry. If that partnership had flourished and developed we might now have a good alternative to the tech billionaires. #
And before that a few oddly empowered crazy-ass people at Netscape had an idea that bloggers had the answer, not Google. I don't really know who they were, they communicated through their actions, not via email or the phone. Same kind of thing happened with XML-RPC, except there I knew the people at Microsoft who momentarily bent the corporate rules to make something happen quickly and simply in the market. #
Spoiler: The tech industry eventually had their way. As a friend from Microsoft who is now gone liked to say: too bad so sad. 😄#
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! :-)