Scripting News: Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.#

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems. #

Last update: Tuesday August 12, 2025; 12:25 PM EDT.

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! :-)