You suck, I'm great! April fool.#

Silicon Valley, when I first got there in 1979 was the place where big change was coming fast. There's always been confusion about the power of individuals, even the richest ones -- imho they don't have the power to change the world, even though they're in the middle of the big change. If they weren't there someone else would be. The changes happening now can only happen because the systems they depend on are already in place. As individuals we get to make art from the change, give it style, a message, make it usable (or not), make it come into existence a bit faster perhaps. But the change itself is coming from evolution, not from individual people. #

In a voicemail to Om Malik yesterday I observed that these things are not chatbots. I don't like the word chat. They have a chat-derived UI, true, but I find I go there when I have a question, much like I go to a search engine. It's a way to search a database that's also capable of writing. I'm looking for docs that might not exist, if so the software will try to create it for us. Much more useful than Google. As much of an advance over Google as Google was over Yahoo's directory. #

Jake Savin, longtime friend and ex-UserLander, has been playing with my personal chatbot. He discovered that he could teach it how to program in UserTalk, the scripting language of Frontier. It also appears he was able to correct mistakes? I wonder how that works. But it's no longer purely my chatbot, now it's Jakes too? Hmm. (I trust Jake, that's not a problem. But I might not trust other people who explore my pod.) #

Also the Chat Thing people have made it possible to share sessions without screen shots. That will make a big difference. #

Learned yesterday that Twitter is turning off version 1 of their API. So even if I wanted to pay, I'd have to do a bunch of dev work to stay on their system. Makes the decision to walk away that much easier. No way I would choose to spend my very limited time on such make-work.#

I updated the Markdown archive of Scripting News going back to 1994 to include March, which just concluded. #

Welcome to April 2023. The outline for March has been archived. #

Poll: This may be the last poll I run on Twitter.#

Tomorrow is, of course, April 1 -- the day when people on the net lie about the people they hate and call it humor. #

The Twitter Blue thing would’ve worked better if they added new features instead of taking out existing features.#

For AI to become a medium for the people like blogging or podcasting the cost will have to come down.#

The first mention of the Twitter API on this blog appears to be: Feb 20, 2007, with discoveries scattered through the month. #

I keep watching the last scene of this week's Succession. #

Can you imagine growing up, going to school, knowing that the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t protect you from terrorists who are slaughtering kids just like you, or maybe actually you.#

I think I figured out how to get Radio3 functionality into FeedLand. #

Ken Smith reports breakage in the connection between Drummer and Twitter. Yup. There's going to be a lot of that, could happen tomorrow, or really any time. I'm not going to try to go with Twitter on this trip. Drummer and FeedLand have been converted to email-based identity, all the rest, including features on Scripting News, could break. That's how the web works. We know when we build on corporate APIs at some point they will stop working. Twitter has had a good run. I started writing to their API in 2006. I was hoping for great innovation and huge growth, but it didn't happen for devs, for whatever reason. Je ne sais quoi. C'est la vie. Que sera sera. #

Good morning. Still excited about the personal chatbot I've been writing about all week. But -- now that more people are running queries, I see how "inventive" it can be. Someone asked what awards and honors I've received. It provided a list, but as far as I can tell they're all bogus, awards that may exist, that I did not receive. I've had a nice career, but only one award, if my memory serves me. Oddly that award was not included in the chatbot's list. #

Not song of the day: The Disgusting Brothers. 💥#

This is where my personal chatbot is.#

I've been trying to figure out what to call these things. For now, I've settled on personal chatbot, like a personal computer. #

My personal chatbot is a good writer, composition-wise. I asked it what kind of food I like, and it answered with a story about me and my longtime bud Dave Jacobs and how we both like Chinese food. It's been a long time since I've taken a writing class, but I think that would get a good grade. Find a way to tell a story, rather than just reciting facts. Make it about people, and people will read it. #

I wonder if my personal chatbot should have a name. I asked the bot if it had a preference. I quote the bot: "As an AI language model, I don't have personal preferences or emotions, so I don't require a name. However, if you'd like to refer to me in a specific way, you can choose any name that you prefer." Reasonable. #

My personal chatbot just invented a feature for BingeWorthy, by lying about its existence. #

A theme you keep hearing is that bots spell doom for programmers. If so, it's justified. There are orders of magnitude too many programmers. The tech industry doesn't factor, they do the opposite, reimplement things that work well, or throw out things that work well in favor of things that don't work at all. I think the bots are now going to help us do the factoring we humans wouldn't do on our own. All the layoffs in tech foretell this. The truth is stranger than fiction. #

The reason it's nice to have old people around is that we don't care about the future in a personal way, so we might just tell you the truth. We also tend to be smartasses. 😄#

I think "personal chatbot" may be a fanciful anachronistic name, like weblog for the ears, which ultimately became podcasting.#

The British reporter did not coin the term podcasting, my dear chatbot. You're in the shithouse now. It's even worse. The chatbot thinks I credited the British reporter with coining the term. No I did not. The term was coined by Dannie Gregoire. #

Seth Godin has a personal chatbot just like mine, also produced by the Chat Thing folks. As Seth says, pretty soon, everyone will have one. #

A question to start the day. Has Dave been to Italy?#

The exploration of my personal chatbot filled with the archive of Scripting News going back to 1994, continues. #

BTW, let me get in a plug for Chat Thing. I've been working with the developers to get this up and running. They've been fantastic. #

I asked my chatbot to describe my style of writing. Flattering.#

I asked my personal chatbot what I think about coral reefs. An example that puts no writers out of business, since they weren't writing about this topic.#

I just asked my chatbot about the San Francisco newspaper strike in 1994, which was a seminal event for blogging, believe it or not -- and there's probably more stuff in my archive about that event than in the rest of the web. So I'm going to link to a Google search result instead. Let's see how that works! It's a reminder that for some things, Google is still considerably better than my chatbot. #

I've been asking my chatbot what I think of various tech companies, people and products. For example, here's what I said about General Magic, a Silicon Valley company that led in early PDA products. The team was made up of past and future tech superstars. Note that I just added to what I say about the company, so it'll be interesting to ask this question again in a few days. We haven't got the Markdown version of my RSS feed flowing through the database yet.#

BTW, it seems Markdown has become the default way to feed new data into chatbots. We're converting my OPML files to Markdown. As always -- Markdown is "Just Enough HTML."#

I asked the chatbot if it knew what "Just Enough HTML" means. It did a great job, but didn't pick up the connection to Markdown. #

Noted that my blog has been taken over by my chatbot which desperately needs a name. I wonder how the chatbot will absorb references to itself. And of course then come the third level references, which is what this post is. Oh the humanity!#

Then I asked if there was a connection between "Just Enough HTML" and Markdown, and omg it got the answer totally right! If this were a student of mine, they'd get a freaking A+. Maybe just an A because it didn't include the connection in the answer to the first question. #

It was suggested we ask questions related to time. For example, "When was the first time Dave wrote about the iPhone?" January 10, 2007. But how does it know which article was first?#

Summary: Today's experience with my personal chatbot has been fantastic. I love it. We're just getting started. Yesterday was the first day. Learned so much today. Expect to learn a lot more tomorrow. #

Today's song: Christopher Lydon. Hi Chris! #

My new (today!) chatbot, programmed with the archive of my blog, going back 28+ years, is up and I've been playing with it, and am as impressed as I hoped I would. An example, I asked who invented RSS? Can you imagine how much I’ve written about RSS in 20+ years? The first part is boilerplate, could have come from any site, but the second part was a very concise, thorough and interesting synopsis of years of my writing about feeds. The chatbot did very good work. #

One great thing about the new chatbot for my blog is that it gives me a greater incentive to post here, vs social media. Of course we must be just days away from a Mastodon instance that you pay to join that adds every tweet to its dataset. A place of record. Maybe they should even charge per tweet. #

In the next election the Dems must make the Repubs defend the idea of school kids being murdered without any help from the government. If they can't manage that, we need to find new political leaders. And when the Repubs bullshit, the Dems have to say they're bullshitting. #

Silicon Valley is full of sore winners (and losers). Not a whole lot of grace there, imho. But, tucked away in the corners, far from public view, there are still a few people there who get off on making great products and actually do.#

I got my Tesla over a year ago and it still feels like a privilege to drive it. Like I won the lottery. I feel like a teen with his first car when I drive it. It's so smooth and powerful, grabs the curves on mountain roads so effortlessly. Elon Musk -- feh. What a schmuck. But they obviously have some wonderful engineers inside Tesla who dreamed of making the best car ever, and somehow they did it. #

I watch Succession, the HBO drama. Spoilers follow. Last night was the first episode of the last season. At the end, two characters who are married came to the conclusion they'll divorce. A sad moment, beautifully acted. The scene ends with them lying on a bed together, clothed, far apart, but holding hands. I thought, if you're going to do it, this is the way. Let there be at least a little love in the last moment. #

It would be nice if someone developed a Mastodon gateway for apps. A system that played the role that twitter.com played for the Twitter API (only it would be really easy to be better, btw). Otherwise does every developer really have to do one of their own? That's gotta be factorable. Just because Twitter is languishing, it doesn't mean that a new system that does what Twitter did, without any of the Muskness or history, couldn't come in and fill the space occupied by Twitter. Don't assume people don't want. I bet a lot do. Learned this from our experience with RSS. You have to accept facts, not be wishful about these things. Be prepared. #

Watching the demonstrations in Israel, I wonder why this hasn't happened yet in the United States after the Dobbs decision. What will it take to get our people to feel the threat to the country? #

Ken Smith tried an experiment. He asked ChatGPT to give him a few interesting stories on Scripting News. So I tried it too. I'm pretty sure none of the recommended stories exist.#

Today's song: Loving Cup. It took me the longest time to find this song which was buzzing around my head this morning, but I couldn't find the lyrics. What I was ultimately looking for was this line: "What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz." I was asking for beautiful world and then beautiful girl. A few minutes later another bit of a lyric became clear and it turned out to be the title of the song. I brought it to Bard, it got it right off. A few seconds later Alexa was playing it for me. So ChatGPT is also like Napster, which was a breakthrough because all of a sudden we could program our own music. It'd amaze today's young people to know there was a time when we had to depend on radio stations to get around to the song we were jonesing for. We'd sit there with our cassette recorder waiting for the song to come around so we could get a copy of it. Then think of what a huge revelation Napster was. All of a sudden the floodgates of music opened up. Jerry Garcia didn't make it to that moment, he would've loved it, I'm sure. Pete Seeger was alive, not sure how he felt about it. But anyone who really loved music imho, had to have been overjoyed. People were talking about music in airports and supermarkets. You had to be there. Napster was like years of Christmas every day for music lovers everywhere. Of course the music industry didn't agree. #

Open question: What do you think of ChatGPT for porn?#

I only like imperfect beauty in women. I find there's little that's interesting in supposedly perfect bodies. #

I got access to Bard this morning, which is Google's version of ChatGPT. I'm still pretty confused about what it is, the same way I was confused about the web in 1994 when I first got Mosaic and was reading various early websites. I can use it, but how do I create for it? I have a huge dataset of my own, most of 28+ years of my writing here on Scripting News starting in 1994. Anyway, the first thing I did was ask if I can add my own data to their massive dataset (their term) and it said yes. I asked how, and it sounds really easy, totally within my ability to do, and almost certainly within your ability too. I took screen shots of the relevant parts of the discussion and added it to the thread I started on this topic. I will try this out and report back. #

Today's song: We'll Meet Again. #

Knowing yourself is like a 12-step program. Sometimes you drop down a few levels into the trance, and you need a "sponsor" to help you pull yourself out of it. Obviously no one else can pull you out, you have to do it. A friend can help. #

Here's the thing about Twitter. Since they started showing the number of impressions on every tweet, you can see how meaningless the number of followers is. You could have 66.7K followers, but your tweet might still only get 764 views. Once, a long time ago, Twitter was a flow machine. Now it's like a dry lakebed. A void. It looks like Twitter used to look, but looks aren't everything. #

If there were no "organic" blue checkmarks on Twitter would you pay $84 a year for a blue checkmark, given that everyone who saw it would know that all it means is that you paid Twitter $84 a year?#

On the dark side, AI is going to be a great tool for 1984-type governments, because with a single script you could rewrite history everywhere. Write people out, and other people in. Kind of like Wikipedia of course, nothing new actually. 🚀#

BTW, please -- someone should offer a package that can load a series of RSS feeds into ChatGPT. Here's a Node package I wrote that makes reading a feed as simple as it can possibly be. #

I asked a question of ChatGPT: "I have a blog with archives going back to 1994. I'd like to have that content loaded into ChatGPT so it can be part of the knowledge base. I am a JavaScript programmer. What's the easiest way to get a quick result?" I understand the code, I think -- but I'm no closer to understanding what to do. How do I come up with the prompts? What if I have no prompts, what's the result? They say be careful of the cost, what is the cost based on. I feel lost like I did when I first saw what the web could do, I wanted to know -- how do I set up a node on the next. The answers I got from those in the know made no sense to me, until they did. Here's a place to comment. #

I wish journalists would pay more attention to issues a bit further away than their own navels.#

Not much going on today. Look for some posts tomorrow. 💥#

Today's song: Harvest Moon.#

Poll: When will we have a general strike re the Dobbs decision?#

Braintrust query: Getting AWS to stop emitting a message.#

Update: We got two good solutions to the BT query above. #

Fixed a problem in reallysimple package. It caused FeedLand app to crash, occasionally. Just had to check that something wasn't undefined. I love fixing problems like this. It's how software gets burned in.#

What if there were a social network for two people. So the messages wouldn't be mixed up with everything in a chat app or an email client. If the point of the conversation is to start a record, make it easy to go back through the chain of thought. And that a thread might last decades, even a whole lifetime. It's time to start thinking about long-lived special-purpose communication apps. We have the experience now, and the perspective. #

A thread on Mastodon in support of a social network for two.#

Would someone please make an easy way for me to feed 28+ years of writing into an AI model so i can ask it questions about what I wrote??#

FAQ: In FeedLand is it possible to load in a collection of feeds via an OPML file? Yes. Here's a screen shot. #

A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two RSS feeds -- one for your likes, and one for the likes of all users on your FeedLand.It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader. #

Archive of my blog from March 2003, marking the start of the war in Iraq, and my arriving in Cambridge to begin my fellowship at Berkman.#

Reading my notes on being at Harvard, it sounds like Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I was very excited, and it shows. In hindsight, I was about to have some great adventures. One of the best experiences of my life. Now twenty years later, I'm still very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the people I met at Harvard, and the power afforded to me with the H-bomb business card. The friends I made there still benefit me to this day, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

So it's been twenty years since I started at Berkman. Thanks to Charlie Nesson, Jon Zittrain and John Palfrey for giving me the chance. Met so many who became lifelong friends, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

I remember when I got a key to the building. I didn't ask for it, and I certainly didn't expect it. My first thought was hmmm i wonder what i can do with this? That's where the regular Thursday evening meetup came from.#

The first thing I did when I started at Berkman, twenty years ago, was to get a blogging server up and running. It was 2003, so I used Manila, a product we made at UserLand. It was the first weblog server at any university, in the world. Early days. A few years after I left they converted to WordPress. A solid move both times because by then UserLand had shut down and the default blogging server was the software made by my friend Matt. #

In FeedLand, if you're being asked to log in every time you go to the site, you're probably opening it via a bookmark that goes to the old URL. The easiest fix is to edit bookmark so it goes to https://feedland.org/ -- note the https. Another fix is to do a hard-reload of the page. This will force a new version to reload. It redirects if it gets a non https request. #

I get that people don't like that ChatGPT will return incorrect results. But as a software developer, I can experiment with the product with that caveat, and imagine its uses once the quality of the results are better, however they achieve that. I don't have to wait to think, in other words. With that disclaimer, I searched for docs about how to do a hard-reload in popular browsers. Those docs are hard to find, and when you find one it's heavily monetized. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to write a docs page to answer this question. Looks pretty good to me! No bullshit in the page either. #

A steady flow of new signups on the first FeedLand server. #

Almost everything you do on FeedLand is public. You can read anyone else's feed list. Example, Ken Smith's list. If you're signed in, to subscribe to a feed just click the feed's checkbox. You can also see who's been on recently, when they signed up, how many feeds they subscribe to, and how many pages they've viewed. You can also see the feeds that have recently been subscribed to. The idea is to make feed discovery as easy as it possibly can be. We steal (and improve on) ideas from social media apps that didn't exist last time I took a fresh look at feed systems. I don't think of FeedLand as a feed reader -- it's more of a feed management system, imho.#

I first wrote about the use of checkboxes in this way (see above) in 2007. I called it Checkbox News.#

Another important feature, every user has their own feed, which you can edit in FeedLand, of course. To write a post, click in the edit box at the top of the page, type some text, click the Post button. It should show up in the list of user-feed posts, below. If you want to edit one of your posts, click on the text, make the changes, click the Update button. Of course there's an RSS feed for each user, which you can subscribe to in FeedLand or any other RSS-compatible application (there are many, as I'm sure you know). #

It's important for users to have their own feed in the same way it was good to be able to develop software for the Mac on a Mac. Most users will never make a software product, and maybe most FeedLand users won't write publicly, but you want to make it was easy as possible for people to contribute to the ecosystem they use. It's a philosophy of the active not-just-eyeballs users. It's a basic democratic idea. #

Docs: Starting up in FeedLand.#

On reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens. #

Poll: I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and I said none of my friends have had plastic surgery. They asked how I knew, and I admitted I didn't.#

It will be possible to create better teachers out of ChatGPT tech. What led me to that is that it certainly could help people write better bug reports. It would have far more patience than a busy developer, whose job is to fix bugs, not decypher a user's (justifiably) imprecise understanding of how software works. But a chatbot could help, patiently asking the user questions. Then, of course, over time -- the user would learn how to do it themselves, and get this -- they would also learn how software works. There might be some great programmers out there who don't know they are. 😄#

Back in the day, as they say -- when I was going to a city somewhere around the world, I'd post something on my blog and we'd get a meetup going. The world was smaller then or so it seems. Maybe it's just me, maybe I've gotten smaller.#

It seems like the transition of FeedLand from Twitter-based identity to email-based identity has more or less worked. As part of the transition, and please this is only for people who read Scripting News, so don't pass it on -- membership in feedland.org is now open. It had been closed since Dec 12 when I started working on the transition. You only need an email address to sign up, not a Twitter identity.#

My blog is being taken over by ChatGPT. It sometimes can replace four apps I used previously: Google, GitHub, Twitter, Wikipedia.#

I was wondering how I could create something that behaved like an app on the Mac desktop from a page in Chrome. I want to use web Drummer to write docs about something I'm working on in Electric Drummer. It helps to have each in its own window for something like that, rather than switching back and forth between tabs. I was going to post a braintrust query but realized I could use ChatGPT and get the answer right away. It seems to have worked. #

I kind of like the idea of letting the ChatGPT version of history be the authoritative one. In the record of my own life, it's more accurate than Wikipedia, which has been hacked mercilessly since inception by opportunistic credit-takers#

I am surprised when things that depend on Twitter still work.#

I asked ChatGPT for information about "river of news."#

Don't panic when asking for help with software. The problem probably can be solved, but only methodically. #

We're having a huge snowstorm today in the Catskills. Expecting about two feet of wet heavy snow. I'll probably lose power at some point and my internet connection, but I have Starlink as a backup.#

Today's song: A Apolitical Blues.#

Rachel Maddow is bullshit. Every time I listen to her, when she's talking about something I know about, she makes something innocent sound nefarious, I assume depending on her viewers not knowing the facts.#

I was fascinated with Communist China when I was a kid. A forbidden place. Hardly anything came out, except culture created out of Communist Party lies. I wrote letters to the Chinese Consulate in New York asking for everything they had. They sent a huge poster of Chairman Mao and colorful books with gorgeous drawings of Chinese kids doing amazing things because they studied the teachings of Chairman Mao. I wasn't stupid, I understood this was propaganda, but I loved the way they did it -- as a genre. This is what I wrote in one of my best friends' autograph book when we graduated sixth grade and went on to junior high. #

Another glitch -- the other day I asked FeedLand users who had not already registered an email address to do so now. It's basically impossible for me to test this, because I don't have any accounts to use to test this since the connection with Twitter has been pretty glitchy lately. It turns out it's too late to do this transition, so we'll go ahead with the switch to email identity for feedland.org. When it switches over, you'll have to log into feedland.org using your email address, which should work for people who pre-registered. I know it's complicated, I hate it -- it's the worst use of both of our time, we get no new features for all this bullshit. But Twitter is no longer reliable in this role, so we had to do it. I'll keep you all posted here on progress, and appreciate your patience. I think it'll all be pretty smooth after this change. #

To email subscribers, sorry for the glitch last night. Probably due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, the wrong version of Scripting News went out at midnight. This feels familiar, but there's nothing in my notes about how to work around this. I will have a look at the code during the day today and see if I can figure out what went wrong. I was able to get the correct email to go out at 6AM EDT today by editing the stats.json file for the app to indicate that the email for the day hadn't yet gone out, and it immediately started sending out the correct email. #

If Trump were president, he'd have tried to extort some kind of fee to rescue the depositors at SVB. Or just ignored it altogether.#

In five years most of us won't be using Google-like search engines. #

For some people using Mastodon is a political cause like being a Republican. I try to avoid the demagoguery by unfollowing, even blocking people, but it must be growing, because increasingly it can't be avoided and more and more of the messages are touting events that I know are pretty freaking insignificant. As an implementer, you have to watch out if you support features that are only in Mastodon and not based on ActivityPub. Which suggests that as the bigco's start implementing AP support, they're all going to face a conundrum. If we want users to think what we're doing is anything more than symbolic, we're going to have to use the Mastodon API and not ActivityPub, because no one else is doing it in AP, therefore there's nothing to interop with or test against. It's hard to promote a feature when you've never been able to test it. The whole thing is pretty shaky. And most people aren't aware of the subtleties. Time to get out a bucket of popcorn and stay on the sidelines until some of this becomes real. #

If you're a current FeedLand user and you haven't yet registered an email address with your Twitter-based account, now is the time to do so. We're going to be switching the whole system over to email-based accounts soon, and it'll be more difficult to transition your account if you haven't taken this step. 💥#

I asked ChatGPT to write a Zillow-style ad for a house in Hurley, NY. #

Poll: How broken is Twitter?#

A hundred years ago I asked a Microsoft exec when they’d ship open source and was told it’ll never happen, not in their DNA. It happened. When will Twitter peer with Masto? It could happen. #

There's a new test version of Electric Drummer for the Mac. #

Earlier today I used Google to try to find a doc I wrote a few years ago. I am the author. I have the original. Well a bunch of people copied my file and posted it on their sites, with their template and their ads (I don't have ads), and for whatever reason Google ranks their docs higher. Mine isn't even on the first page. So tell me, how is that Google isn't implementing a "man in the middle" attack? Why aren't they taking the heat for delivering incorrect results?#

Same thing happened with the RSS 2.0 spec. There is only one original. Try to find it in Google. Lotsa luck. There's so much bullshit on the search results page. It's amazing we're trained not to see the lies that Google passes off as facts, but somehow we're supposed to hold the startup accountable instead.#

Then I asked ChatGPT where the RSS 2.0 spec is. They got it right. ❤️#

I'm definitely going to see this Jennifer Lawrence movie. #

Keith Richards: "To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it."#

Today's song: You Can't Hurry Love. #

I asked ChatGPT for ten popular songs by The Supremes. #

And a list of popular songs by Cher? Now all we need is an interface to Amazon Music so I can play the songs. Maybe some checkboxes next to list items. #

While my posts on Mastodon tend to be better-distributed than my Twitter posts, the "discussion" there is every bit as insipid and pointless as it ever was on Twitter. People don't read the posts, don't click on the links, ask impossible-to-parse questions, I have no idea why they bother. I want small-scale friend-nets, that aren't connected to anything else. Just my best buds. I don't give a shit if anyone else reads it, or doesn't. I want quality. Sick and tired of all the mindless bullshit. #

Please don't come out with something called Podcasting 2.0 or The Podcasting Authority or Podcasting As Designed By God. Come up with a neutral code name, and explain why what you're doing will benefit podcasting. And then sit down. 🚀#

I asked ChatGPT what was the first weblog. And note, the response is archived on my own site, statically rendered, in HTML. Makes it easier to share results, and for those results to get into search engines. Screen shots are bullshit. #

Here's source code for the Frontier script that copies the chat-gpt files from the Downloads folder to a calendar-structured sub-folder of my publicfolder on scripting.com.#

Manton Reece is our eyes and ears from BlueSkyLand. I applied for a beta, but wasn't given one. Just as well, I'm loaded up to my ears with other stuff.#

Advice from the developer of the chatgpt bookmarklet on how to customize the name of the file it generates. #

Heard someone say you can't leave your PhD to your children, but you can leave them your farm. I take exception. Both my parents had a PhDs, and this gave me examples for the value of knowledge and intellect, and how to figure things out. I didn't inherit their degrees, but I did get their intellectual power.#

BTW, the bit about NetNewsWire supporting the source:markdown element in RSS may sound ho-hum, but it's actually huge. The new things in open formats tend to sound boring when you first hear about them, they take a few years to fill out, but this is enough to get the ball rolling. FeedLand is imho going to be an important product. NetNewsWire already is. Between the two products there's enough to start a bootstrap. Now I'm using their announcement to entice others to jump on board. They're listening more carefully than before. That's why I'm writing this second post, to be sure people don't miss it. Here are the developer notes for adding Markdown to your feeds and to your reader software. #

Last night's Knicks game was wonderful. As the Nets gave up on their buy-a-championship nightmare, the slow-growth Knicks approach has been going great. I'm sure the Knicks would've signed KD or Kyrie if they had offered, but so thankful they diss'd the Knicks instead. Idiots. Now the normal order has been restored. Hopefully the Knicks continue to add pieces slowly and let home-grown stars like IQ continue to grow. It's intoxicating to watch him get the chance to excel as in last night's game, and completely exceed all reasonable expectations. The whole team is fantastic. Our loyalty to the team has paid off. #

ChatGPT: "Give me the names of 23 cities, anywhere in the world, whose names begin with T and have exactly three syllables in their names." Obviously some are wildly wrong. But it's still useful to come up with potential codenames for projects. Better than my previous way of doing it, browsing a Google Map sort of randomly.#

A feature request for the bookmarklet I use to save ChagGPT queries. #

I have a new way of syncing up my outline with the public web, and it's quite a bit slower than the previous method. Which means sometimes I rebuild my home page before all the changes are uploaded, leading to some hilarious mistaken posts. Have to tighten this up. #

Mastodon, where I have 7.6K followers, generates far more flow than Twitter ever did, where I have 66.7K followers. #