I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.#Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard. #
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now. #
- Some random thoughts about wealth.#
- Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What do you do? #
- Answer: You buy things to see if there was a reason to make the money, and it turns out there really wasn't. You would have been just as happy in the big house in the rich neighborhood or the smaller house in a more modest place. #
- Then what if you reach another level, now you have a check in your hand for $100 million, then $1 billion, then $25 billion and keep going. It doesn't stop there. At each level you are compelled to find something fantastic that you can use that money for. Some power that the new level of wealth gets you. #
- We saw in Succession, they played out the lunacy, the people use a lot of space, but they're still just people. If they loved someone or someone loved them, they'd be much happier than all the happiness all that money ever gave them. #
- Having such large useless amounts of money is a not only a problem for the rich folk, we've found out, it's a problem for everyone else too, because eventually they get around to buying political power and they start using the money to change other people lives, always for the worse, it seems. #
- We need a new game that only super rich people can play that doesn't hurt the rest of us. I'm not advising anyone to do anything. But I think this is what I've been writing about on my blog since the beginning. #
- I didn't understand why, for example, Evan Williams didn't just make technology and give it away, after having made billions from Twitter. #
- Why did Bill Gates have to accumulate so much money and threaten the independence of the open web, a miracle, to get it? Why not use your power to make miracles before you retire, start doing the good you were promising to do later, right now? What good, in hindsight, did the extra billions do for anyone, including Gates? When his power was at his peak, in the 90s, he could have done a much bigger thing for the world, give us a free new level of communication that would be available equally to everyone. #
- Elon Musk, having done some incredible things in computers, finance, cars and space, had to invent new challenges that only his wealth can buy, and eventually came up with things that only the US Treasury could buy, and some things like relocating the human species on Mars, that no amount of money can buy (or so scientists say). He needs to receive an award of love and gratitude for not using his wealth to make everyone else totally miserable (including himself, it seems).#
- PS: I haven't yet read Evan Osnos' new book about billionaires. #
- PPS: See also: Transcendental Money, or money that replenishes itself, ie money that transcends time. #
- PPPS: Another one: Your human-size life. #
With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator. Even better, news orgs could do that for them. Or validate a bill against their campaign platforms. "I promise never to touch Social Security" could be validated against pending legislation. The time delay part of this isn't an excuse any longer.#Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user. #
A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.#
I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment. #I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments. #
Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging. #
Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example to crib from.#
I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there in the last few days. 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? #A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence. #
I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible when there was no platform vendor. #- But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.#
- Today most active devs weren’t around when the web came along and knocked down the silos. It is imho possible to have an open social web, but the people who are trying to make one out of complex and closed systems will imho never get there.#
- They would be better off to look for different foundations to build on other than Mastodon and Bluesky. I have one in mind, btw. You will probably be surprised, but then we were all surprised by the web itself.#
- This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post. #
- I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prepared for the "open social web" -- and imho they won't get there. But WordPress is already there. #
- I think some of the products are good, btw -- I hadn't seen Surf, it's basically a feed aggregator that can get input from Bluesky and Mastodon. I don't think they're using their RSS support though. Not adequate. But WordPress RSS is fine. I made an improvement to the Scripting News RSS to add an <image> element that works like the one on a WordPress site. Now my posts can show up in the timeline via RSS. #
- That's the key to what we're doing. Reading and writing, with the UI of a twitter-like product, all built on RSS, with the content also appearing on the network WordPress has defined. I see this as huge. #
- Obviously this needs to be a blog post. #
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?#
- I've been enjoying the new David Frum podcast. He's very good at thinking and does a lot of it, and expresses himself very well. I read all his columns and have read two of his books, even though I don't share much of his pre-Trump politics, I find it interesting to hear how he parses things. I also subscribe to The Atlantic. I listen to him. But in this week's episode it's clear that the listening is one-way. #
- In today's episode we heard from the elite journalist David Frum, interviewing elite editor in chief Marty Barrett, formerly of the Washington Post, and they both make what I believe are wildly inaccurate generalizations about the quality of the news reporting by professionals and the ugliness and inadequacy of bloggers and podcasters. #
- The problem is, they don't read widely enough to know that there are bloggers and podcasters with good intentions, ethics, deep knowledge and experience who are also well educated -- they don't know we exist and therefore can't hear about the huge mistakes they are making with their own self-perception of their role that we can see because we are not in their world. (BTW, I have been in their world, I was a contributing editor at Wired, a research fellow at Harvard and NYU, each for two years, and I have collided with Frum-like elites, the usual response is a hand-wave of dismissal, written off as not worth listening to, I guess.)#
- Frum, at the end of the episode talks about how the press covered Biden's incapacity, that led to the second Trump term. They should have stopped, once we were all informed of what happened, and let the electorate decide, it wasn't up to them, or the celebrities they gave space to in their op-eds. In the United States, the people decide. Instead they put up a roadblock and wouldn't let the issue drop. We all knew, we were all informed, probably long before we read a single article about his debate performance. They should have stopped. That was their malpractice. #
- Their responsibility was to give us the information, and it was also their responsibility to stop right there. Once informed, they were wrong in continuing to harp on it. #
- We saw them do it with Governor Cuomo of New York. And Senator Al Franken. And Donald McNeil at the NY Times. And on and on. There's so much reporting that's lazy and incompetent, but they'll never report on that, because of their conflicts. And they never listen to their critics. And as a result they play a role they are not entitled to play. #
- They need to wake up to the idea that while reporting from their bubble is still important and is heard, they misuse it regularly, and we are fed up with it. If they want to control the government, do the right thing, and run for office. Don't do it from your byline in the Washington Post or NY Times. #
- FediForum is a virtual conference that starts on June 5. If they had asked me to keynote, this is roughly what I would say. #
- Imho this stuff is pretty freaking simple, esp since there are well over 20 years of prior art to use, and not that many ways to do what we're trying to do. I'm impatient, so here's a quick set of observations with my opinion, take it for what it's worth, ymmv, etc. #
- You shouldn't be reinventing so much. Always look around for prior art. That will make it possible for you to interop more quickly at both a software level and at a human level. #
- Don't invent stuff you think you may need later. Save that for later. You have no intuition for what's needed and more important nothing to test against. You will get it wrong 100 percent of the time.#
- Don't invent stuff you think you may need later that makes what you're doing now more complicated. I see a lot of that in ActivityPub. #
- The only reason you're doing all this work is for interop. If you've been doing it for years and you don't have much meaningful interop you're doing it wrong.#
- Write the software first. Use formats that exist, or if you must invent new stuff, make sure it's simple. Work on its simplicity as you would any other feature. Factor! If there are going to be 100 interoperable products and you make it a little more difficult to implement, that work will be multiplied 100 times. And it be a barrier to entry, so you may not get the most powerful interop possible with the most interesting products. #
- Read and follow the Rules for Standards-makers. There aren't that many. But if you're breaking them, you're not going to end up with a standard. If your goal is to appear to be making standards, you should also read RFSM, and don't do anything in it. I've seen people do that btw. #
- Have you looked at the world outside the tech stuff to see how important this all has become? All the time we're wasting is very costly in everything that depends on the social web actually existing as opposed to just being talked about.#
- Now, what would I request if I could influence you??#
- Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more (see the next item). #
- They'd support the basic features of the textcasting spec, including Markdown because it's a great standard, very much of the same school as RSS. If it had existed when we did RSS 2.0 it would have been part of it. #
- That's it. Really not much work. #
- From there we'd have 25 years of interop to explore. #
- And we could really call this the open social web.#
- I'm ready to do it any time you all are. #
- Yours in not wasting time.#
- Dave#
- PS: I asked ChatGPT to visualize me giving this talk.#
- PPS: Comments or questions on Masto or Bluesky.#
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."#
- Below is a screen shot of a post written by Doc Searls as viewed in Bluesky. It's jarring. The big picture of Doc gets in the way. #
- I realize no one designed this, but it also is reality, it's how a lot of people see Doc's writing. #
- Here's my suggestion. When the user specifies a featured image for a post, set the og:image element in the head section of the page. When they don't specify such an image, omit that element. #
- That's how we did it in the Baseline theme, and I, as the writer, am happy with the result.#
- Human beings spend far to much effort feeling better than some people or feeling inferior to others.#
- This is understandable, I guess, as far as evolution is concerned, up to a point, but I think we've been past that point for a long time now. Now, evolution brought us to a point where in order to survive as a species we have to get over this need to rank people and work together.#
- So if you feel other people are better than you, get over it. Same thing if you feel better than others. You aren't and they aren't.#
- Your shit still stinks and as the great Republican philosopher Joni Ernst so eloquently put it, she's going to be dead pretty darned soon and so will you.#
- I have to remind myself of this when I see a picture of someone who is really ugly but acts like they're not. And when I say ugly, I mean ugly inside. I say to myself "Davey, they are reflecting off something inside yourself that you don't like. On a different day they might seem very beautiful to you!" So I can relax and stop worrying so much about what I think about them in the moment. It matters not one bit.#
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. #
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. #
- I'm working on something that requires an endless stream of test posts. Sometimes when I start writing I end up something that should be published. Should I edit it? Nah.#
- this shit is hard. when it's done it looks simple. but these pieces must fit together. #
- that's why it's soooo stupid to throw out all the interop, because it's going to take you forever to recreate it, if you ever can, which you probably can't.#
- this is the lesson that activitypub and atproto are teaching once again. and the people who are dealing with this have probably known it a long time.#
- it would be so much faster to use something that already works and is widely supported.#
- this is why we used mp3 in rss to make podcasting. we could have said oh shit i don't understand how mp3 works, so let's create one that does only what podcasting needs. only of course it'll turn out that podcasting needs everything that mp3 already does.#
- accept a win. don't feel compelled to reinvent everything. you'll find out it wasn't as easy as it looked.#
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. #
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."#
- I feel like I should help Harvard, because Harvard helped me, and if you use podcasting or RSS, it helped you too. #
- In 2002, I was ready to leave Silicon Valley, and RSS needed a safe place to be parked, or I felt the tech industry would keep trying to own it, and make it far more complicated than it needed to be. And I wanted the intellectuals of academia to blog. #
- So I knocked on the door at Harvard, because I heard they had a program that was close to being up my alley -- the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. My friend John Perry Barlow was a founding member. I figured if they could handle a Grateful Dead lyricist, and general muck-raking rabble-rouser like Barlow, they might be able to appreciate someone of my creative caliber. They accepted me, gave me run of the place, defended us when we got in trouble and great things came from it. But I always felt like a bit of a thorn in the side of the great elite Harvard University. #
- Yet I really really really appreciate what they did, but I think what I have to offer might not be appreciated. #
- I think they should take advantage of their unique perspective on what's happening in the US, and cover it in a way that no news organization would or could, but the way a great, challenged, revolutionary academic institution would. And it might be that the people who would destroy it don't want to take the risk that Harvard might be heard, and it might be a bit premature for them to think they can take control of an organization that in a sense represents the best of the USA since 1636. #
- PS: When Harvard was 140 years old it stood against the King of England in the American Revolution. The Continental Army lived on the Harvard Campus in 1775 and 1776. The precedent for revolution is baked into the soul of Harvard, it seems to me. #
- I never really had any opinion about the Indiana Pacers. #
- Honestly I was surprised they even made the playoffs this year.#
- And they did catch the Knicks with their pants down, after clearing out the reigning champion Boston Celtics in the second round of the playoffs this year, it took some time before they found their balance again. We learned, again, that we need to have some minutes every game where Brunson takes a long well-deserved rest, so there's room for KAT to lead the team (our other all-star and all-NBA player), and make sure the other Knicks get a chance to shine, and give the Pacers something to guess about. Brunson is great at charging the rim against all odds, but you don't make the Finals if that's the only trick in your quiver. Hopefully we don't have to keep learning that lesson. #
- My advice for Halliburton, take a moment and breathe and realize this series isn't over. The Knicks have a say in it too. And the two teams are remarkably well matched. And despite what the pundits say, there's nothing very special about the Pacers, in fact they have some growing up to do. Halliburton, if they should happen to win another game this year, should learn that either of the first two games in the series could easily have gone the other way. And so should the freaking pundits, when they focus on how great the Pacers were and how pitiful the Knicks are. The Pacers won the first game by three points, and the second one by five. And the Knicks won the third game by six. Could have gone the other way too. And the Knicks are fucking great at overcoming 20-point deficits. The absolute best in the NBA. I have to remember that too, because there was a point in yesterday's game where I gave up. Dave of little faith. #
- They will call this dance The Halliburton Choke. Reggie Miller made it famous and Halliburton made it ridiculous, and vice versa. #
- It was so predictable. Shortly after Pete Rose died, baseball rescinded his lifetime ban, and now he can be inducted into the Hall of Fame. #
- I grew up with a Pete Rose ethos, why shouldn't I go for it all? I feel so sad that he couldn't have gotten the acceptance he so totally deserved. How could we not forgive him? He was Charlie Hustle! ❤️#
- A role model in so many ways, and like all heroes he had fatal flaws. You may think he set a bad example for kids, but I say the opposite. You don't give kids enough credit. #
- What he taught was that a man with average athletic ability could will himself to achieve. #
- He had more hits than any baseball player ever. #
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. #
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.#
- Andrew Hickey whose podcast I support, also appears to be strongly against people using ChatGPT. #
- I am a programmer, so you might think I'd see it the same way because what I do is similar to what musicians and prose writers do in that I create "intellectual property" which can be easily copied.#
- But we have a different culture in software, we tend to by default share what we do and let other people use it. They're supposed to credit us, but people are selfish and greedy and they will tend to take whatever isn't bolted down, and it sucks, but you accept it.#
- What's funny is Hickey appears to have no clue how much he's benefited from this ethos. His success probably would not have been possible without some people thinking it's more important to create the medium he could use any way he saw fit, than to own one that would probably have kept him out.#
- Creating is not as linear as he appears to think, which so ironic because that's basically what his freaking podcast is about. He loves to say "no one did anything first" (paraphrasing) and that's basically the same idea.#
- And I don't doubt that the next big media invention, the next podcasting perhaps, will benefit enormously from having ChatGPT available for the people developing it.#
- PS: This appeared earlier as a post on Bluesky. And I wrote every freaking word, as I always do unless disclaimed.#
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. #- Look at this, for an idea of what a product says to the prospect.#
- It makes you laugh. When you laugh inside an idea forms. #
- "Ain't it the truth."#
- That gets you ready to read the pitch, which is stuff you wouldn't have read or even considered if they hadn't said something so true right up front.#
- This is what's wrong with the opposition political party in the US, they think all they need to do is recite the facts. But first you have to convince them you speak from the heart, you'll tell the truth, even if it hurts. #
- It's an ugly car. Yeah, but you'll come to love how ugly it is because it's so beautiful inside. What you say next hardly matters, because they already believe that you speak the truth. And that's when they're ready to sign on the dotted line.#
- That's what the Republicans do so well, before and after Trump, that the Democrats don't even gets exists. #
- I finally figured out what the Dems need, the top guy has to be an entrepreneur. Needs to understand how to get people ready to believe the truth. And make the product deliver a truth the people choose. And now sign on the dotted line. #
- PS: More Volkswagen ads from the 60s.#
- The Knicks did actually win last night. I didn't dream it.#
- I remember when the Knicks sucked.#
- In my heart I believe they still do.#
- But here we are, my Knicks actually have an approximately 1 in 4 chance of winning the championship. #
- I hope it's Minnesota we end up playing. #
- All in the family. 😀#
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. #
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.#