This week's New Yorker Politics podcast is an interview with Jeopardy champion and host Ken Jennings. Great stuff if you, like me, are a longtime Jeopardy fan. We used to watch it in our Flushing kitchen in the 1960s when Art Fleming was host. #
ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs.#
There are a bunch of useful demo apps in the reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The feeder app, one of the demos, is used to generate the Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the scripting language in Drummer. #- Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year. #
- First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one of the very nicest things about writing this blog, going back to 1994, there have been quite a few people who skim the technical posts, of which there have been many these days, as I am preparing to try to shake up the world of discourse on the net, hoping to get it back on the track it was on before the silos came along and monetized us. Ultimately, if it happens, we will all benefit, techies and non-techies alike. #
- I thank you all for your patience and indulgence. #
- Most of the non-tech readers I hear from are women, btw. My mother for example was a regular reader. For whatever reason, pleasing women is about 1,000,000 times more important to me than pleasing men. Possibly because I had a gutsy mother who programmed me that way. Almost nothing makes me happier.#
- Another thing that makes me unreasonably happy is to be back in touch with most of the developers who worked with me at UserLand on Frontier. Starting wtih Jake Savin, and then André Radke, Brent Simmons and Wes Felter. And esp with Brent, who went on to write NetNewsWire, the hugely popular feed reader for Mac OS. This means so much to me. I spent years bouncing ideas off Brent and listening to what he said very carefully. I also strived to pass on through each of them my values of software, computer networks, and our responsibilities to users. Each of them are different, have different strengths, but they are all lovely human beings. Reconnecting this year wasn't in any way a goal of mine, it just happened that way. #
- Another thing that makes me absolutely optimistic about the future is to discover the compatibility between the vision of the web that I shared with many of the early web developers, again going back to 1994 and the following years, and today's developers of WordPress. We occupy different spaces in tech, I'm a web developer who works in JavaScript in the browser and Node.js, and they work in PHP and their own platform, but as I opined yesterday, you can use the web to connect all flavors of things, by design. I used the criticism that Mastodon and WordPress are like apples and oranges, an American idiom that usually connotes incompatibility, but on the web, you can connect apples and oranges. Differences are negotiable, you have to remember that -- and taking advantage of the web that way is what it was created for. Like the internet it was built on, the web makes it possible for very different things to work together, and in doing so makes it possible for people to work together too. #
- I know I've thanked him before, but it's worth doing again -- thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for his very timely invention of the web, which set users and developers everywhere free, only to have the siloers re-emerge fourteen years after its advent to give power back to the bankers, with the predictable, disastrous results. Our political system suffered a massive virtual oil spill thanks to Twitter, which we have yet to begin to clean up. As a result health care is in a very precarious state. It has been used as an instrument of war. Who could have imagined that a cutely-named system like Twitter could do all that damage, but it did. #
- TBL gave us a taste of freedom. Many of the WordPress community leaders are too young to have had that taste, but they still believe in it. And that's probably the most important thing to be thankful for. And maybe it's not the only tech community that has that inspiration at its core. And maybe that feeling extends beyond tech?#
- We build bubbles to contain us, to make the communities we're part of smaller and thus more manageable. But if we do it right, we can be part of the Macintosh world and the WordPress world, and build the proper interfaces to our work so we're also part of the web. That's where the magic comes from. The unforseen connections that "just work" the first time. That's where I've chosen to work as I approach the end of my career -- on the intersections that route around the silos and return the power of the web to the people. #
- BTW, maybe this idea can connect to the story of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson, three of my current-day examples for how we can use communication to get back on track to a world with purpose and a heart.#