Today's song: Good Morning Good Morning.

Greetings from the Catskills where it's a bright early summer day.

The real story of RSS is that in a moment when the NYT had a spirit of adventure, they backed RSS and as a result news adopted a technology that was pioneered by bloggers, not the tech industry. If that partnership had flourished and developed we might now have a good alternative to the tech billionaires.

I have to carve out time to get Bingeworthy working again. I miss it.

I have a Mac Mini that keeps running out of space on its internal drive. It happened again, but this time it offered to open an app that helps me find the big stuff. I don't know when this app came to be, but it's very helpful. In a few minutes I was able to free up 100GB of space used for all kinds of frivolous purposes, like backups of every mobile device that's ever come within wifi distance of this machine (or so it seems). I'm sure there's a way to get it to store some of the frivolous stuff on the 16TB external drive, but I sure don't know how to do it nor do I want to know. My head is so overloaded with other BS from JavaScript, CSS, Node.js, my own software, etc etc. My brain has been out of space a lot longer than this Mac's has. I desperately want to move my act to Linux and reclaim all the memory I'm using to store stuff about the Mac, which isn't really doing me much good, I use the Mac as if it was a Linux machine. However, I remain a happy shareholder, that's my revenge, and why I bought the stock in the first place. I was so unhappy with what Apple was doing at the time (1998) but I could see that it would make beaucoups money, so I hedged. I figured at least they'd make me rich while completely annihilating all I had done to make the platform great. My inner greedy capitalist has his revenge. I would still rather have seen Apple keep Frontier running and have lost some of the profit I made from the Apple stock. Anyway, as usual I ramble. 😄

According to reviewers Hit Man is a movie for adults, supposedly with a plot, writing, acting, from Netflix. Rated 83 on Metacritic (a must-see). I was excited! Watched it. It's like a TV sitcom. Ugh. Zzzzz. The main character has a nice-Brad Pitt like smile. Wears weird constumes. Finds a beautiful girlfriend. Best thing about it is that it takes place in New Orleans, so I could try to figure out where they were. That's about it. Much better implementation of a similar idea -- Emily the Criminal.

I bet you could do a nice AI that would create a graph of people who are connected to other people through far more criteria than networks like LinkedIn or Facebook could. It could take into account all of those connections and others. Kind of like a current-day geneology of relationships.

I find I look for new stuff in the social web the way I used to look for new stuff on news websites before we got RSS and feed readers. It made a little sense when it was only Twitter. But now I have to check Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads too. It's not just the writing that has to be distributed manually, but also our time as readers. And then there's the question of where you reply if you have something to add.

More bad financial advice: "Give money to Trump! He needs your help! They're out to get him! You're next!"

I used the ChatGPT "upload an image" feature today while debugging some software. I could show it what wasn't working with a screen shot. Amazingly it understood and made the connection to the software we were working on, and suggested a modification that made it work properly. This was an important missing bit of functionality, previously you had to explain in words what wasn't working visually. That worked too, but was cumbersome. Much easier to just show it was wrong. And the UI couldn't be simpler. Take the screen shot at paste it into the box where you normally type. It starts analyzing before you press Enter.

Jon Stewart from this Monday is good to watch as a reminder of what the press could be doing beyond what Jay Rosen recommends (which is on the right track). They could be playing the same role that the 12 jurors in NYC did. I'd love to see a requirement that every moderator of a major news show in the US do jury duty for a couple of weeks a year, to keep them aware of the standard that should also apply to news, not just justice. (Update: Jay is on it.)

If podcasting had a marketing team behind it, we'd run a campaign that says "It's not podcasting if you don't have choice." If you have to use Apple, Audible, Spotify or Google to listen to something, that's nice, hope it's good for you, but folks that is not a podcast. Podcasts give you the listener all the power. If you give it up it'll all be Disneyfied before too long. It pisses me off that Amazon Music sends me messages about all the new "podcasts" they have. I mutter under my breath when I hear this, some expletive I'd rather not repeat. Amazon, the users know that podcasting == user choice, and they hate you just a little every time you lie about it. Find another term you like and use that. You have the money to do the marketing. Come on, just once play fair. You'll be surprised how good it feels, and I wouldn't be surprised if the users reward you for it.

I introduced a bug in the blogroll code where it was ignoring instant updates. Probably the sexiest feature in the whole thing. The bug was introduced on March 21, so it's been there a while. You have to hard-reload the page to get the new version. So, when I post this on Scripting News, it should move to the top of the list immediately. So a good use-case is to leave Scripting News open with the blogroll visible and every once in a while you may find something interesting to read. I like having it there, but of course, it's my baby, so that's understandable. :-)

I tried listening to one of Kara Swisher's interviews for her new book. The interviewer was someone I respect, Brian Lehrer at WNYC. But he has an old and imho unfair view that CraigsList and Facebook are responsible for the demise of local news. I was surprised when he said as much near the start of the interview. Then Swisher went into an obviously very well rehearsed schpiel that confirmed that he was absolutely right and the tech gods weren't fooling anyone. OK that was my limit, I switched to another podcast. She's got a great business model. Tell the press what they want to hear and you will get good press, pretty much guaranteed.

Started a new outline for the month of April, with March safely archived on GitHub. If you want to read the month in outline form, click this link and it will open read-only in Drummer. That's a pretty good approximation of how I edit it, except I use the desktop version of Drummer that writes files to the local Mac filesystem as well as to the cloud.