I hate sticky keyboards. Very low tolerance.

Thanks Mr President. This needed to be said.

Matt Terenzio, who has been a friend for many years, threw a fat pitch about people like me who think the NY Times has a lot of explaining to do. I don't think anyone is listening, but my issue with the Times is when they embrace and promote conspiracy theories that damage our political system. Matt says we have many truths, and I think that's where we differ, there has to be one truth when it comes to accusations of the kind that the Repubs throw at Democratic candidates and minorities. When they take a side against the people, that's when I have a problem.

"Too much of everything is just enough." -- The Dead.

It's not much of a secret that my next product is the minimal writing tool I always felt WordPress should have. I have not been doing this in conjunction with Automattic, I'm not sure we're on the same planet re what WordPress is for. Ultimately it'll be their decision if this idea gains traction. But I keep hearing people ask for this product, and I think it's the reason Substack and Ghost have become popular. I'm going to put it out there, and see what comes back. 😄

Also, I'm using their Calypso API to talk to WordPress. I like it. Well-designed and documented. I've built another layer that makes it even easier for a browser-based JavaScript apps, and also added storage, which you can't do a web app without.

BTW, I love the new margin image of NakedJen. Talking with her the other day we decided this would be the opening scene of The NakedJen Movie. The meaning of the image is well-known to people who travel with the Dead, as Jen did. I've never been to a Dead concert with her, but I understand it's like going to a Comdex or MacWorld in the 80s or Esther's or Stewart's conferences for me in the 90s. Sure you go for the music, but mainly you go to schmooze in the hallways. I love talking with her on the phone the most. We have thought about doing a podcast, and even tried recording one, but our one-to-one conversations are much more interesting, and funny. We're take turns being Pinky or the Brain.

I did a search on my site for NakedJen.

Google thinks I meant "Naked Men."

This is why Google should know I have a blog and it has it indexed, and if it just looks it would know that question shows how dumb it is.

When I type my mother's name in, searching on my own blog (again) it tries to correct the spelling of her name. My own mother's name.

Google started out so smart then they must have lost all the smart people. Or they got stupid? I don't know. But there's so much they could do to improve their product, it would be sensible to, while they're shooting for the fences, do the small things that would give users an idea that there's some humanity to the product.

PS: ChatGPT should also know where my blog is, and it should be constantly loading the updates. This is the freaking breakthrough. Do it.

Is this the user experience writers want from WordPress? If I were designing it, I would start from scratch, build an easy writing tool for writers to focus on writing, make the design process accessible if they want to work in that mode, but keep it out of their way because most writing has nothing to do with design.

A simple example where ChatGPT saves programmer time. MySQL has awful error messages. Rather than try to figure out what they mean, I paste the message into ChatGPT and say nothing. It tells me what the error was and even fixes it for me. I copy the result, paste it into MySQL and I'm back on the road. One can imagine where they build that into the MySQL app and I converse with it instead of the app with the awful error messages.

Meanwhile the Repubs are getting ahead of themselves. Bannon said something that he should be arrested for. I'm sure it's horribly illegal to threaten people the way he did, and he did it in public.

Someone should tell the kids the Repubs will come for their weed. Just sayin. There probably are a number of voting age youngsters who have never lived in a time and place when cannabis was illegal.

By popular demand -- my blogroll now makes it more clear that the permalink to each item is the date of the item. Screen shot. This is a convention in blogs and social media apps that the timestamp doubles as a permalink. And I think this is more distracting, and cluttered, but let's give it a try. It's possible that people missed that they could go to the website from the blogroll. Now it should be more obvious.

The Repubs are coming uncloaked. Their slogan might as well be Revenge. It's the one thing everyone who votes for Trump wants more than anything. They hate their lives, and are looking for someone to release their rage on. They don't know how else to do it. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement. Ask a billionaire if you don't believe me. They have huge grievances which you would have thought all that wealth would have cured them of. The new Nazis have a selling proposition that works every few generations, after the memory of the previous societal explosion are gone. My parents, the last people I knew who lived through the Nazis are gone. I just have the memory of the aftermath, and it wasn't pretty. “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” We're at the beginning of the "happen again" moment. My grandfather told me what to do, but I won't do it, pretty sure of that.

It's been driving me crazy watching Stan Krute doing all these weird and often beautifully bizarre ChatGPT images, and realizing they are only being seen by people on Facebook when there's this huge world of creative people that don't or won't use FB.

Then it occurred to me, I have the perfect place for these images, outside the facebookiverse, that would showcase them, and be easy to produce (I don't want to take on responsibility for big production overhead myself).

I have images I put in the right margin of blog posts on Scripting News. Small little bits of creative color, that may or may not be connected to the story they are next to. And sometimes connected in non-obvious ways, intended to make you think.

Then NakedJen sent me a recent picture of herself that's perfect for the right margin. Seen in the right margin of this post.

Here's a page where you can scroll through the collection of images I can choose from. I'd love to add more creative stuff here. And I'd love to get some of Stan Krute's genius or Brad Pettit or whoever else might be so inspired.

No promises about when or if they'd be used. You can post them here, as comments on this message if you like.

I may have to restrict this to people I follow, just letting you know, based on past experience.

Podcast: Why the mechanism behind ChatGPT doesn't matter. As usual I ramble all over the place, but hopefully this illuminates and perhaps entertains. 15 minutes.

And before that a few oddly empowered crazy-ass people at Netscape had an idea that bloggers had the answer, not Google. I don't really know who they were, they communicated through their actions, not via email or the phone. Same kind of thing happened with XML-RPC, except there I knew the people at Microsoft who momentarily bent the corporate rules to make something happen quickly and simply in the market.

Spoiler: The tech industry eventually had their way. As a friend from Microsoft who is now gone liked to say: too bad so sad. 😄

I started replying to a post by Tim Bray in a thread on Mastodon, but quickly hit the character limit, so I moved my act over here.

ChatGPT gets rid of a huge problem with Wikipedia.

It often only represents a story from one point of view.

So the story of the Mac is a story of Apple, not the developers.

Same with the story of RSS. I'm sure you know the story they tell, but there's a whole other story, about how Netscape and blogging got together with Salon, Wired, Red Herring and Motley Fool, and eventually brought the NYT and NPR on board, and that created a powerful standard supported by the entire publishing industry, that led to social media and podcasting. It really has very little do with the attempts of the tech industry to undermine it, other than their attempts failed to do that, yet if you read the Wikipedia page you'd get the idea that the bigco's heroically fought back against what exactly it's not clear.

I can't contribute to that page, based on the rules of Wikipedia, so your idea that I could just work harder to get the story right, well it's not ethical for me to do that. The best I can do is write about it on my blog (as I'm doing now) and hope that someone goes in there and fights with whoever is in charge of keeping the story as it is. (Although Tim, not you, it would be unethical for you too.)

Wikipedia also has served as a way for people to take credit for things other people did. Notoriously, Ben Hammersley claiming he chose the name for podcasting, for which there is absolutely no support. If ChatGPT made a mistake like that people would be howling. I'm sure Wikipedia is filled with junk like that. Why wouldn't it be.

And btw, I still point to Wikipedia pages from my blog posts over all other sources, because it has the potential of getting better, while other sources don't.

But ChatGPT is Wikipedia plus everything else and it has software far in advance of search engines for uncovering alternate angles.

ChatGPT gets all angles of a story, if they have been covered on the open web. I don't know why it's better at finding stuff, and also understanding my queries even though they're not rigorously specified, my understanding of the technology is nil, but as a user, I love the way I can explore history, and get a lot more than just the result of a weird culture that you have to spend years politicing through to be able to contribute. ChatGPT has managed to route around that outage.

It's also an amazing programming partner, and I imagine that it would work just as well for visual artists if they used it to try out prototypes of ideas, esp if new ways of training it are explored, which of course they are being.

Having known each other for 20+ years, I suppose that's a big difference between us, you seek out those kinds of political frays, I get very impatient with them and move on.

Also, I'm not here to debate. I don't like online debates. 😄