I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two of them. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s with Frontier. Today I might have one of the largest public codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week? #

Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and over in tech. There's a virtual conference today, FediForum, that on their home page repeats the hype. Why do people do this? What's the point of pouring your time into technology you hope someday will be open? I bought a ticket to the conference so if there are any sessions that look like they might be productive I can participate. I even wrote a keynote, so you can see there is a way for this stuff to start working, quickly, if the vendors you're looking up to are sincere in their promises. I've posted it on Mastodon and Bluesky so if you have comments or questions, we can start the discussion now, or any time.#

Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the political environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way. #

Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)#

If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. It's remarkable how much time this seemingly small feature took to implement. One of these days I have to move this code to one of my more modern servers. One reason it took so long is that a random package that does something that never changes, had a breaking change in it. The breakage culture of the Node.js world is just plain fucked up, no other word for it. #

And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.#

I've heard that Andor is great stuff. I'm on episode 6 of season 1, and it's the usual Star Wars bullshit. It was fun in 1978. But now? It's so freaking boring. Tell me it's worth continuing to watch, that it gets an actual plot at some point.#

I had a neighbor and friend a long time ago named Ann Doerr. I used to joke with her how her name was a combination of two of the main types of logic gates in computers. I think that's what attracted me to the Star Wars Andor show.#

I now have the special ChatGPT function I've been waiting for. Codex. Give it access to my entire GitHub collection and let it go. I stopped myself from authorizing, wanting to sleep on it. I know I'm going to do it, but.. Gulp. Do I really want to dump all my thinking for Sam Altman?#

On today's Bill Simmons podcast, their Knicks expert, Van Lathan said "I would under-react but they're going to over-react." I heard that about an hour before the Knicks fired their coach. I don't think it's good or bad, it could work out great. No one knows if this was The Season the Knicks were meant to go to the Finals, but if it was, maybe next year will be too? There's no right answer. Maybe this was Dolan's call. I hope not. #

"Courtesy" calls from insurance companies aren't.#

If you followed the Knicks through the playoffs as I did, I recommend the latest episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. It began with talk about the fan base and that got me thinking. We don't know what would happen if the Knicks were in the Finals. Honestly. It could be the antidote to the crazyness. Maybe the reason things are so fucked up is that it's been 52 freaking years since the Knicks won the title. Something happens every so often, the energy field around the Knicks shifts -- Patrick Ewing, Melo, Linsanity and now Brunson. It'd be interesting to map that out against events in the world at the corresponding times. We won't find out this year. In the same way I sensed that New Orleans was doomed when I went to school there, I have a strong feeling connecting the Knicks to something not sure what, but it feels big. #

Jeremy Herve of Automattic responded to yesterday's suggestion about when to set the og:image metadata in a page. His response is persuasive, but there may be a way to work around it. And a hat-tip to Jeremy, he's helped us so many times getting WordLand ready to market. When you're fitting a product to another product as a platform, it's so important to get help from the vendor, and usually you don't get much of that. Thanks! 😄#

Jay Rosen gave a brilliant short talk in 2008 about the role of links in the web, and how journalism would have a hard time translating their self-contained worlds with the idea of the web, which is there is no container other than the whole world. Lots of important ideas in Jay's talk. For example, the idea of developing something from one direction or the other. The problem with Bluesky and Mastodon is that they're coming from Twitter, and think they're aiming toward the web, apparently -- but they must not understand the web, because they're going to have to break with Twitter's model in so many ways to reach the web, they'll never get there if they go slowly. If you tried to develop the social web by starting with the web, you arrive at a different place, w/o all the problems of twitter-like systems. Different problems, but not the ones the twitter model has. How do I know? Because I know. 😄 #

I asked ChatGPT if I moved to NYC in 2009 or 2010. It answered in an instant. "You moved to NYC in 2010." I asked how it knew. It used my blog as the source. We have arrived in the future. This is exactly the kind of query I've been begging Google to support for decades. They could have figured out where my blog is, or let me tell it where it is. Famously they once asked if I had misspelled my mother's last name in a query. How freaking clueless can you get. #

Krugman is right, living in NYC is amazing. When I lived in Manhattan betw 2010 and 2019, I had it great but toward the end I yearned to live in the mountains, the year before Covid hit (that was a bad time to be in Manhattan, btw). Now I yearn to again live in the city. Funny how that works. Even in the 70s I felt safe in NYC, and I commuted to school from Queens to the Bronx. It was safe enough to let a 14 year old kid ride the subway into Manhattan and up to the Bronx and back, every freaking day. I never got mugged. And I did all kinds of dangerous stuff that independent-minded teen agers do. If you can afford it, I recommend you spend some time in NYC before you believe the bullshit the Repubs say about it. They have reasons not to like the cities that have nothing to do with how nice it is. In NYC we don't trust our politicians to tell the truth. You shouldn't trust yours so much either, dear Republicans. 😄#

In honor of the Knicks' very successful season, I temporarily put the paper bags fans at the top of my home page as a reminder to anyone who wants to blame someone on the Knicks for how the season turned out. I think we should all wear the paper bags on our heads as a reminder of how we felt about being Knicks fans not all that long ago. They are always a horrible team to love, whether they're playing for the title, or just trying desperately not to be the worst team in the NBA this season. Love hurts as some wise person once sang. #

It's already June 2! It seems like just yesterday it was June 1!#

From Facebook on this day in 2015. "There should be a required college course called Introduction to Assholes. The student would learn how not to be manipulated by jerks."#

Good morning and welcome to June. Another month gone, and coincidentally the end of the NBA season. I woke up this morning with the worst hangover ever, and I haven't had a drink in months (never was my vice, I have others). The Knicks lost fair and square to the Indianas last night. My first message came from NakedJen who isn't as far as I know a Mets fan, saying simply "Let's go Mets!" I like that, though it will of course take me some time to get re-adjusted. I think the Knicks were jinxed because Brunson said in his podcast that New York has two teams, the Knicks (I agree) and the Yankees. What! No. I think we may have to consider trading him to a team without philosophy. I'm not sure anyone will have him though, considering this possibly fatal flaw, philosophy-wise. And no doubt the Knicks are going to change some things over the summer, and I've heard that they might try to get Kevin Durant. I sure hope not. I think the Knicks are benefiting from the jinx he put on himself when he tried in vain to stir up a "rivalry" between the Knicks and the Brooklyns. No, that isn't likely to happen, unless they try to become a contender without kicking the Knicks in the butt like KD did. Maybe the Portland Trail Blazers will want him. That's about as far from New York as you can get in the NBA. And with that I now officially shut the door on the 2024-25 NBA season. We had a great run. See you all in October! 😄#

Why does Apple invent their own proprietary plugs when everyone else does USB? Even if you don't like to speak ill of Apple, you know why they do it. They want to control who can make add-ons to their products in hardware, just as they do in software. I still buy their products, but I also buy products that use standards, so I can use them on lots of devices. Now, the same thing happens in software from other people and companies. They can choose to use what already exists, or invent their own. Example, I chose MP3 for podcasting, did not invent a new format. If I were to do a social web network, I would use RSS, I wouldn't invent a new format. I want interop. I want to create an open platform, I don't mind making money, but that's not why I do it. #

RSS never had a big corporation acting as a benefactor. Is that why imho RSS hasn't been considered as the backbone of the social web? Probably more likely it's the Fog Of War nature of tech development. We have so many forks of so many things we don't know what anyone else is doing. It's easier to invent your own than figure out what the other thing did. Perhaps ChatGPT et al will change that. Yesterday I used it to get an understanding of how the content:encoded element came to exist and evolved, and you'd think I of all people would know, but I didn't. ChatGPT did. #

Podcast: The Knicks won game 5. #

Thinking of splurging on tickets for Game 7 at the Garden on Monday. I've been following the prices during the playoffs, never seen them this high. Courtside seats go for $27K each. BTW, there's no guarantee there will be a Game 7, first the Knicks have to win tomorrow in Indiana. #

A somewhat obscure question about how feed readers should handle content:encoded elements in WordPress feeds. #

I love this piece about Anthony Edwards and how the OKC's guard against him by double-teaming, so he can't have the ball, and that allows them to steal the ball more often from other Minnesotan ball-handlers, and also limits Edwards opportunities to shoot, but it does make it more possible for others on the team to shoot. If he does his job, the pundits and fans say he's slumping (low points). But he's just doing his job. Same thing, flipped around -- when they say Brunson is scoring so many points, he's doing great, like LeBron or Kobe, but actually it's a sign the team is fucked up. Too dependent on one offensive player, the others are just standing around in case he wants to pass it to them. I exaggerate, but it does work out that way. What you want is a team where there are always lots of options, and to the extent that they're hot, the team is impossible to defend. But a Brunson holding the ball all the time makes it easier to beat the Knicks? That was (as I've said a few times) the problem with Melo. Now we've seen the non-Brunsons on the Knicks kick ass. If the Knicks don't make it past this round, and it is it seems pretty likely -- next season they should focus on configurations that have to sink or swim based on whether they can win without Brunson. Then, next year, we'll have something, perhaps. But I'm just a fan, seriously, no sarcasm. Same way I'm a fan of AI, I have no idea how it works, and I'm happy with that. And don't tell me it's like auto-complete, try using it for a while for real stuff, and tell me how you know that from using it. You don't. Each system has quirks that you have to learn the same way you have to learn the quirks of team members, and help them do stuff they're good at, so they can handle the ball and take shots without you getting involved. That's how you start to get teamwork. See how that works kind of like basketball? :-)#

And btw, that's why I wanted Chris Lydon to do interviews with people in his audience who are tripping out on all the new power they're getting from AI. How is it augmenting their work? I know Chris well enough that he probably thinks it's not for him, too technical -- but that's the point -- the excitement with AI is not technical. That's the story all the other reporters are missing. It's the light in the users' eyes when they struggle to make you understand why it's the most incredible thing ever and they're so glad to have lived to see this. That's the freaking story. Help them get the ideas through. BTW, we have no idea how AI will rock our boat, we never did for other similar inventions. Who knew what the Beatles would lead to when they came to America. They said (the Beatles did, with ridiculous humility) that they expected their fame will last a few years at most. PCs a few years later were supposed to be for the kitchen. Apple actually ran ads saying that in the late 70s. And the web? Well Chris was around near the beginning of that and knows how our eyes glazed over at the utopia we were envisioning, and we know, to some extent how all that turned out. The AI story is a great one, and as Chris had very little understanding of blogs when he did the series of podcasts in 2003 and 2004 that should win the Pulitzer Prize for being so presicent and courageous, he's the right guy to get this story, if he has the patience and stamina. This is the story. Sure you have to cover Harvard v Trump but AI is a story of love from the users and that story hasn't been told yet, and it's a big one, like what were the Beatles for and why, in 1964. #

BTW, just for fun, a search for Ole and Lena jokes. 😄#

The Knicks are playing the Pacers tonight. Very pivotal. If the Knicks win, it becomes a best of three series, and two of the three games are played at home. Not necessarily so great for the Knicks, they do well on the road. The players say it has something to do with being able to focus on the game and not on family, that came from Mikal Bridges.#

I asked ChatGPT to review my archive on the Knicks and to summarize my feelings about the team over the years. This is what they said. "Your sentiments toward the New York Knicks over the years appear to be a blend of enduring loyalty, cautious optimism, and occasional frustration. Your writings reflect a deep-rooted connection to the team, celebrating their victories and expressing hope during promising times. At the same time, you don't shy away from critiquing management decisions or expressing disappointment during less successful periods. This combination suggests a passionate fan who remains committed to the Knicks, appreciating their highs and thoughtfully analyzing their lows."#

A day away from the blog. Really enjoying the NBA playoffs, even though the Knicks are still in it. Nice turnaround after the first quarter for the Minnesotas. Still hoping for a finals between them and the Knicks. It'll be interesting to see how the Knicks change their lineup. Hopefully no more isolation-ball with Brunson. It's boring and doesn't work. Melo 2.0. Might make sense if he was LeBron, but he's not and LeBron's game is boring anyway. Let's do this well, win or lose. #

Has Harvard considered opening a satellite campus outside the United States? If the Trumps keep making demands, like demanding that they stop admitting students from outside the US, the students the US government rejects could still go to Harvard, be taught by the same teachers, collaborate and socialize with other Harvard-quality students, without interference from Trump. I imagine there are a few countries that would be willing to help. If you want to really make a point, open it in China.#

If you're into Mastodon, you can follow my daveverse blog, the one I write using WordLand, on Mastodon, using this address: @scripting@daveverse.org. Mastodon preserves links and styling, and doesn't seem to have a size limit. I can edit my posts and you get the updates. So Mastodon kind of informally has become a blogging system, which I totally applaud. It checks a lot of the boxes from my textcasting manifesto. Slowly the world is starting to make sense. #

A couple of little tweaks to Daytona. It now has a history menu which it saves in local storage. It's useful to be able to come back to a recent search. It remembers the last 50 searches this way. Also had to add a little hack that turns off other copies of Daytona when another one launches. Use a local storage trick, save a random string to a fixed location, and every second check to see if its value has changed. If it has, another copy of Daytona has launched, so I redirect to the home page of my blog. #

I would pay extra for cable service to have none of my money go to Fox News. What made me think of it this way is this great scene in Moneyball where Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) reminds David Justice that the Yankees think so much of him that they're paying him $3.5 million a year for him to play against them. That's valid. #

The Knicks got beat last night. And the game seemed so won. When Brunson sat down in the fourth period because he was in foul trouble, the Knicks had a huge run that put them up by 17 with less than 3 minutes remaining. My numbers might be slightly off. Then they brought Brunson back, and it all flipped around. The Pacers were getting off shots where they weren't before, and their aim was deadly. So it wasn't just the Knicks folding, the Pacers were hot. The announcers were so clueless, the Knicks didn't need Brunson back. He was benched a good portion of the final blowout with Boston. I loved that. Showed he can sit down when needed, and the team will keep going. When he was injured in March, the Knicks faltered at first, but then they learned how to put it together with the remaining players which believe it or not are a full NBA team, a very competitive one. So when Brunson gets in foul trouble and the remaining Knicks are in a groove don't screw with it. That should be the lesson of last night's game. The Knicks were very good, net-net, but the Pacers were better and they won. #

I mentioned Chris Lydon's weblog for the ears and got an email back, and this made me think some more. We need someone to do a canvas of how intellectuals use ChatGPT-like systems to advance their research and creativity, or just for learning or fun. It's the same kind of opportunity that was in front of us in 2003 when blogs were new, and only a few people loved the idea, but they were fierce in their enthusiasm. You could tell something was happening. It happened before that with PCs, and now it's happening again with AI. I'm absolutely sure of this, as sure as I was with PCs and the web. So Chris, humor me -- this is your new assignment -- find out from the people who listen to Radio Open Source not what's bad about AI, they hear that all the time, let's hear their stories, why they think it's the best thing ever. I believe you'll find them. That's what's missing today in journalism, and it's something Chris is uniquely able to do. BTW, here's a list of things I've written recently about ChatGPT. #

I turn off CNN when they start a segment on Jake Tapper’s book. The level of hypocrisy is intense. Who covered up what? Please. I remember Hillary's Emails. And weapons of mass destruction. And Trump may not be good for America but he's sure good for CBS. And on and on. They think we don't think. But their influence is getting close to nil. American news is one story at a time, debates between boring people saying the same bullshit over and over. Democrats who stumble over their words. An occasional glypse of Bernie or AOC. Something to get your bile up, and the next one and the one after that, but it doesn't work anymore. What Biden did or didn't do is no more relevant on CNN than it is on Fox. #

MySQL, which I'm using for Daytona, has the idea of relevance in searches. Previously I had been showing results in reverse chronologic order. So now, a search for Matt Mullenweg gets the same results but prioritized by MySQL. This is the query. What's nice is that the results are focused on the early 2000s, when the standards we use now were coming up. We can do this kind of stuff again. There's more to do. For example, it would be really cool if Pocket Casts, their excellent podcast client, would let users publish their subscription list so we can build applications on them. There's a whole new base of data to work with. And unlike other media, podcast content is meant to be shared. The controversies that exist for professional writing and audiobooks, for example, don't apply to podcasts. If we could open this up, we could create an ecosystem worth of applications very quickly. OPML is an easy format to get into a database. We just need sources of interesting data.#

I've been looking up all kinds of things now that my new Daytona search engine has access to my blogging going back to 1994. I just did a search for Mullenweg, and came up with this blog post by Matt in 2006 about the Feed Validator. The clarity is remarkable, and he's of course right. The people running the validator were actually promoting Atom over RSS, and were trying to tilt the table towards Atom. The goal was interop, not to give Google or IBM control of the syndication format of the open web. When you keep changing your mind about what to flag and what to pass you end up with a standard that's as murky as the tariff policy of the US in 2025. I think you have to assume that was the goal. They didn't like that RSS didn't fall apart when Atom came out. If there's no benefit in changing, people don't. #

What it means to be distributed. Mastodon and RSS can't go down. But Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook can.#

I've been working on the search function for this blog, and now we have all the DaveNet pieces between 1994 and 2004 in the database. Autoweb was my first static site generator. Here's a search for menu sharing which was a technology we made on the Mac that allowed people to write menus of scripts in Frontier that appear inside other apps. Netscape supported it as did MSIE, Quark, Eudora and many others. It was kind of magical, esp when the apps themselves were scriptable (many of them were in the 90s). Next up, I'm going to import the home page of Scripting News from 1997 to 2010. It was mostly a linkblog then. #

When I announced Chris Lydon's podcast in 2003, I called it a weblog for the ears. We didn't have the name podcasting yet. #

Having the 90s and 00s in the index means I can look up old friends like Chuck Shotton.#

As the import script runs I just tried looking up Engadget, got zero hits. I expect that link will work in a while after all the importing is done. #

And with this update, we don't depend on OPML any longer to create the database, all the data is exported in a format that can be easily imported directly into an SQL database. I provide the schema and example JavaScript code that, via SQL, updates a database. Hopefully this creates a better more useful archive. #

How to understand Trump talking about tariffs. Remember how he talked about Covid. Same thing.#

Apparently Chrome has changed the behavior of images served over http in web pages. It's changing the request to https, so it gives an erroneous error message about the certificate which the page never claimed to have. #

I was going to use this code in the UI of my search engine, when it wanted to display an image over http, reroute it to use an https proxy server. But Chrome wouldn't stay out of the way, so had to give up. Hey I was trying to route around their outage.#

Does Joe Rogan know about what's happening with Medicaid? #

Not much to write, so impressed by the way the Knicks got past the Celtics. I don't know any Celtics fans, but I imagine there are some subscribers who are. Hard to imagine how hard the last series hit you all. I don't have anything against the Celtics these days although Paul Pierce is an asshole, and I hope you all know that. Just watched the OKC win over Denver. All around an incredible group in the final four, very diverse and inclusive. And btw now that I think of it, Jaylen Brown was grabbing Knicks players by the balls. I hope you all come to terms with that. We do love Kristaps in New York, a true gentleman. Maybe he and Giannis can come play for the Nets. We may have room for another great team in NY. #

This is what my WordLand blog looks like now. Quite a transformation! Sooo pretty. We're going to keep tweaking it up, so it's even more beautiful and more and more useful, but it's going to take some time. As the Supremes used to sing -- you can't hurry love, you just have to wait, la la la la. #

One thing I've been waiting to hear about Trump's $400 million jet. We don't need the money. #

How feeds work in WordLand. #

Great Art on Bluesky is back. A beautiful work of art every hour. #

The Democrats need an entrepreneur at the top. Stop doing things as they’ve always been done because the media has changed. The old rules no longer apply.#

If you get the nightly email, a questionnaire. Is the text a good size? Easy to read? Suggestions?#

RSS-based podcasts are built-in and not going anywhere. Here's why. As long as there are lots of good podcasts available for listening to via RSS on phones, every competitive 'caster is going to want to be there, because their competitors are. And as long as I can get a good selection of interesting stuff to listen to on my phone, there's no reason look elsewhere. And as far as I know I can't listen to a YouTube "podcast" in my car or when walking. One more thing, please stop using death metaphors re RSS. Learn how framing works. A few nasty people in the early 00s did a number on RSS and started putting that awful word next to RSS. It was a way of earning points from the people who ran Twitter and tech conferences like SXSW, basically asshole-like people who wanted to close the door on the open web. And now here we are 2.5 decades later and people are still doing it. You should self-censor on that one, those people are long-gone, probably doing stuff with crypto or nuzzling up to oligarchs, and you're keeping their asshole-ness alive. That's pretty fucked up. #

I wanted to design a Google Form, and thought to ask ChatGPT for instructions from a spec I wrote. Then I thought to ask Gemini, which is Google's chatbot, wondering if they would just do the work for me instead of providing instructions. I would have laughed out loud if they did, but alas, just instructions. Eventually they will do that for you. #

New WordLand feature: Edit all categories for a site.#

Video demo of the new categories editor in WordLand. I wanted to be able to add new categories and edit the descriptions of existing categories without having to leave WordLand. I feel that categories are an important part of writing.#

This is what it says on Google about tomorrow night's Knicks game vs the Celtics in Boston. I've pointed the red arrow at the part that makes me think I must be dreaming. NYK leads 3-1. Yesterday at this time (5:30PM Eastern) I was in a funk, sure that the Knicks were about to be obliterated by the Celtics who had blown out the Knicks on Saturday, and the beginning of last night's game confirmed that suspicion. The Knicks couldn't seem to hit a shot, and the Celtics were hitting 3-pointers over and over and over and over. My body chemistry shifted. I felt the doom members of an ancient tribe of primitive humans must have felt as we were losing a war for existence with a neighboring tribe. It's primitive, but it's real. However! In the second half it turned around. The Knicks came out with a purpose, unlike the previous two wins, this one was not a squeaker at the end. The Knicks were masterful. They won this game, not by luck or perseverence, rather simply by being better than the Celtics. The reigning champion Celtics who must've relaxed just enough to fuel the victory for the hometown boys. So we're up 3-1 now. The Celtics have to win the next three. If they lose one, it's over. No I didn't think we'd be here tonight. Remember that when you feel sure you know that something is going to turn out a certain way. You just never know, it could come out a different way, as unbelievable as that might be.#

Google may be forced, for the public good, to sell Chrome, or spin it off as an independent company. Who would you want it not sold to? If it were independent how would it make enough money to maintain the software? What should change? What should not?#

There must be a group of librarians somewhere exploring ChatGPT-like products as a completely new library experience. #

I worked my way through all six seasons of Peaky Blinders. I had tried it a few times before and found it hard to get started, but this time I persevered, got to know the characters, and enjoyed the stories. I knew the series was about to end as we approached the end of the final episode, and thought things were about to wind down, and then it took a little turn, no spoilers, that maybe was the best ending for any series ever. Originally I thought that honor went to Six Feet Under, which had a kickass ending too, but when I re-watched the series recently I realized the rest of the show was pretty awful. Ever had that experience when you thought a show was great, and then re-watched it and realized it was junk? That happened with Deadwood too. After a while I just couldn't watch it, it was so insipid. What was I even thinking the first time around? Not sure what's next on the agenda. I know I'm watching the Knicks tonight, with a certain dread. #