Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2024-05-18T13:58:27Z
Today's song: You Can't Hurry Love.

- 2024-05-18T14:01:07Z
On Threads I posted this question to Frank X Shaw, a PR exec at Microsoft, who I've known for at least 30 years. "Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When did we give up?" I think you can do the design with words and dialogs, btw. Here's a great idea for keeping threads focused and civil on Facebook. You can limit comments to people who have a stake in being on good terms with the author. This keeps the hit and run turds from dropping.

- 2024-05-18T13:52:39Z
This blog is becoming a ChatGPT blog the same way when it started it was all about the web. I'd love to get pointers to other blogs whose content is largely about ChatGPT these days, so we can systematize learning about what we all are discovering. I think that blogs and ChatGPT are going to go together just like Google search and blogs did when search was booting up. Bloggers (not all of us, but some) provide good material for bootstraps. We just need to hook up blogs to social web, which is what I'm working on this year.

- 2024-05-18T13:50:55Z
A few weeks ago I asked ChatGPT if it could transcribe an M4A audio file, the kind of file that Apple's voice memo app produces, and it said no, it couldn't do that. I gave it another try today and got a different answer. I uploaded the file, and it came close, it said it needed the file in WAV format. It gave me instructions for writing a desktop tool that would do the conversion. I expect in another couple of weeks they'll be able to deal with the M4A file directly.

- 2024-05-18T13:43:44Z
I think it would be really cool to have the voice interface for ChatGPT available on Amazon Echo. I kind of doubt that Amazon would want to do that. Alexa is nice, but really weak compared to ChatGPT.

- 2024-05-18T13:22:11Z
Do people understand the impact ChatGPT can have on how we control our software? No more hunting through menus among a thousand options to figure out how to do something. Just use natural human language. The UIs we've had to design and live with will be a thing of the past. Yet no one seems to be talking about this. An example. I've been trying to get transcripts of my voicemail, as easily as possible. In that example, it shows me how to do a variety of things. I kept asking if it could do it for me, all the way up to making a feature request of the developers at OpenAI. At some point they'll be able to add an item to my calendar, or make a feature request for me. That's the whole point of computers. They can do things for you. We call this paving cow paths.

- 2024-05-18T13:17:09Z
Most of the news stories about AI are bullshit by people who clearly have not attempted to understand what its capabilities are. This is the real thing folks. Amazing breakthroughs are happening every freaking day. So much improvement and so much potential. How do I know, because in comments on social media, people parrot the bullshit, like they always do. Journalism is still hugely influential, and they are dishonest, lazy, self-interested bordering on narcissism, and very very dangerous. We need to re-form journalism as if our continued existence depends on it.

Knicks update - 2024-05-18T13:27:21Z

TL;DR: For the 80,000th time -- the Knicks suck!

All the funny farting didn't make a difference last night. The Knicks were blown out, again (sigh), by the Indiana team. My dear friend NakedJen texted me from Oklahoma of all places (I don't know how she got there, or why, she must be on her way to some other place, maybe Dallas?) that the Knicks are trying to kill her. Sums it up perfectly. I gave myself leave after the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, seeing where this thing was going. I went to bed, and knew that when I woke up there would be a Game 7 at the Garden on Sunday (3:30PM Eastern). I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The odds are probably pretty good that the Knicks will win that game, but maybe they should just let it go, and we can pick this up again in October. By then all the injured players should be back, and maybe there will be an incredible new free agent signed over the summer, so we're not so dependent on one superstar, who is great, but has off nights, like last night. Why didn't he let any other Knicks try to fill in for him, when he's double teamed that means someone is open. I was screaming at the TV during the game, let someone someone else shoot dammit! Oh my gods. I hate game 7's when my team is in the game. I don't mind it if other people's teams are in a death match like that.

Oh well. Here we go.

- 2024-05-17T16:29:04Z
Today's song: That's the way god planned it.

- 2024-05-17T16:42:17Z
People get all moral about AI, but I for one would never go back.

- 2024-05-17T16:45:45Z
Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When and why did we give up?

- 2024-05-17T16:19:50Z
On MSNBC yesterday I saw a discussion where two black panelists were asked to comment on Trump's idea that black people go for him because they can relate to his awful prison mug shot. How incredibly insulting. It's just like what Trump says about Jewish Americans being loyal to Israel. Such an un-American idea. We all got here different ways. Some for a better life, some for life at all, others as slaves. But the United States is a big-hearted idea -- the United States. It's unfortunate that such a small-minded disunited person is so powerful now. We still have a long way to go.

- 2024-05-17T21:07:34Z
Here's something that matters. Somehow ChatGPT gets the story right about my various contributions. You'll see all kinds of BS in Wikipedia and other various highly rated sites. Somehow ChatGPT sees through the bullshit, and usually gets the story right. So when people say that human reporting is better than machine reporting, I think this may be one of those cases where conventional wisdom is wrong. The human record is relatively easy to manipulate if the researchers are lazy and/or dishonest.

Google and The Innovator's Dilemma in 2024 - 2024-05-17T13:10:08Z

It's overwhelming how much ground Google has to cover to get AI into all their products, but that's what they think they have to do, and I more or less agree. They feel they have to because their main product, search, is threatened by ChatGPT.

Clayton Christensen called this The Innovator's Dilemma in a book published in 1997. It's why Netscape was able to undermine Microsoft when the web came out. Microsoft had a huge beast they had to move, Windows, and all its apps, and while they had a hardcore, scrappy and rich culture, they couldn't overcome the inertia that comes from being dug in, with their cannons pointed at the already-vanquished IBM, not the upstarts that came from the VCs in Silicon Valley.

Microsoft and the rest of the PC industry had written off Unix, but there it was, again -- ugly as ever, but with networking that really worked and was easy, and the users wanted networking even though Microsoft wanted them to want Office.

Google did the same with AI. As did Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. They had AI projects, and used AI in limited areas, as did Microsoft with Unix in the early 90s. But they couldn't bet everyting on it like a startup can. Now they have to. But the they don't have the tools needed to fight the new war. That's the dilemma.

This is the toughest corner any tech company has to turn, but there is an approach that could work for Google. Their strength is distribution. They have all the users. They can take a product that's ready for the world to market in a day. But they can't develop it. You can't snap your fingers and have a good new UI for every one of their products, ready in a year, although they will try as MS tried to adapt Office to the web. They don't have the right people or corporate culture to do that. Instead you have to hope you can find a great bootstrapping startup outside to work with, and use their strength as a distributor to help them. This is what I recommended for Microsoft in the 1990s, and I think I was vindicated, it would have imho worked a lot better than the path they chose.

But now, their third time around this loop, Microsoft has learned! With their OpenAI partnership they've done exactly what I recommended in the 90s. They still have to convert all the old software and their user interfaces around the new capabilities, but at least they also own a share of a bootstrap that's now booming.

PS: I am blessed to have lived long enough now to have been part of now six different rearrangements like this. I love that we have now gotten there again. There's absolutely no doubt now, imho. The six rearrangements -- minis, PCs, GUIs, web, Napster, and now AI.

PPS: This is all my opinion, and from the polls I did yesterday, it's obvious that many of the people within earshot don't agree or have seen the light yet.

The Knicks and the Epic Fart - 2024-05-17T13:42:01Z

Dave to ChatGPT: I just read a news story that the Knicks won the last game in the playoffs because of an epic fart in the locker room. Can you draw a light-hearted illustration of that event?

Version 1

Then I asked for a serious and dramatic illustration.

Version 2

I imagine you can bet on who the farter was.

My guess would be Hartenstein.

- 2024-05-16T20:06:47Z
Poll 1 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "If you're a developer, how much has ChatGPT or its equivalents affected the way you develop?"

- 2024-05-16T21:26:31Z
Poll 2 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "Has ChatGPT replaced Google (or other search engine) when you look up something for a development project, environment, etc.?

- 2024-05-16T13:56:37Z
The thing that Casey Newton predicts for Google and news has already happened for the huge base of reference info and know-how for software development. We no longer go to the sources, don't need to, the ChatGPT version is an order of magnitude better. What we do need is people to keep asking and answering questions for each other, so the knowledge can be added into the AI database. We're going somewhere here. It's worth going there, imho, having experienced the before, and only starting to glimpse the now and near-future. But it's as big a step as the move to PCs, then GUIs, the web, mobile.

- 2024-05-16T13:04:19Z
Something I'd like from ChatGPT or a plug-in. I'd like to create a notebook of info I'd like it to have available for people who inquire about a product I'm developing. As I'm working on the code, I develop features that sometimes don't make it into the docs. But when I'm working on the feature, I take lots of notes in my work outline. I'd like to give that outline to a LLM and let it figure out which product I'm talking about by the context it appears in. Maybe all I have to do is publish the notes when the product comes out, and eventually, like a search engine, my favorite AI will crawl it. I wonder if it makes sense to somehow pre-digest it. I wish I had a panel of experts about this stuff, but I guess they'd have to be human, at least at this point in time. If this makes sense to you and you know how to get started, post a note here.

- 2024-05-15T20:43:59Z
My AI bot is a library, a librarian, a programming partner, tutor and executive assistant. And we're just getting started working together.

- 2024-05-15T15:57:30Z
AI is not over-hyped, imho. I'm discovering new significance for it every day. An example. I had to go back to some very complex code I wrote a week ago. I wanted to give it new flexibility, that would be simple from the user's point of view, and in order for it to work technically it has to maintain that simplicity internally. It's a tall order to go back to something complex a week after writing it, and rip it apart and put it back together and have it retain the simplicity it had before. But I had an advantage this time that I had never had before, a programming partner with a perfect memory. I had written the original code with ChatGPT. So I went back and asked it to review my plan, and then worked with it step by step as I had before. It had perfect recall, right, of course where my recall is pretty sketchy. It took two sessions to get it done, but it works now, and I'm confident I've covered all the bases. How do you put that story in a press release? If you want to understand a new technology, don't talk to the CEO of the tech company that made the product, their lives are whirlwinds, they don't have time or the capacity to understand how big the idea is, they just know that it is big. If you want to understand you have to use it and you have to talk with other users.

- 2024-05-15T13:26:30Z
Martha My Dear is the essential Paul McCartney love song.

- 2024-05-15T13:18:28Z
This is a typical dialog you see when you visit a site with an ad blocker installed. They say that turning off the ad blocker will "support" them. No, I don't think it actually will do anything for them. It might expose me to malware or having my interests shared with businesses who will use that info for who-knows-what. Much better would be to let me click a button to give them $0.50 to read the freaking article that's behind that idiotic dialog, and btw, the payment would have to be anonymous or I'm clicking the Back button. I really did want to know what happens if Trump is found guilty and sentenced to prison. I still do. But I don't think I'm going to turn off my ad blocker. I'll think about it. In the meantime if they had let me pay them $0.50 to read the freaking article, I might have linkblogged it to people who follow me via RSS or email, or on Bluesky or Mastodon, thus giving them a chance to sell others on paying $0.50 to read the freaking article. Not promising I'd do that, but if they really answer the question, if I really learn something I certainly would pass it along. Come on USA Today, get conscious. We'll happily support you for giving us info we wanted, just let us actually help you in a meaningful way, not by penalizing us for having the audacity to use an ad blocker.

- 2024-05-16T00:45:48Z
I wonder if anyone named their dog Alexa, and if any hilarity ensued.

The Knicks won last night - 2024-05-15T16:06:38Z

Knicks at the Garden via ChatGPT 4o.

They needed fresh blood, and they got it.

Knicks won in a blowout.

I had no idea that was coming.

Next game on Friday.

- 2024-05-14T13:10:39Z
Yesterday's OpenAI big press event was a nothing burger. I thought they already had all of that stuff, they certainly had been at least telegraphing it. Also there never will be another Steve Jobs, it's too bad everyone is using his template for product announcements. It only works if you're Steve Jobs.

- 2024-05-14T13:12:34Z
BTW, I've been to three Stevenotes, the first one, the rollout of the Mac in 1984, then the rollout of NeXT in 1988, and a random press event in 1997 announcing they were going with Unix server products instead of the homegrown much easier to use Mac server products. We could have had both of course, but Jobs never really wanted developers imho, truth be told. We were inside in 1984 because Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki were doing the evangelism.

- 2024-05-14T12:38:37Z
It's a crazy world, so crazy that RFK, Jr could be elected president via a third-party. He's a better speaker than either of the other candidates. If he didn't a speech impediment I'd say he was basically a sure thing. I don't know how crazy he actually is, but he cleans up nicely, having seen him interviewed on MSNBC a few days ago. He had good PR training somewhere, it's probably not just from the genes, he is a freaking Kennedy, his mother was a wife of a Kennedy, and clearly raised him well. I'm voting for Biden of course. I'm not that crazy. But people are tired of Biden, I understand why -- and they want a president they can look up to, not one that reminds them of their 80-something grandfather. And people are also understandably fed up with Trump. Before it's over we will come to think of him not as a spoiler but as a possible future president, where "future" is less than a year away.

- 2024-05-14T13:08:19Z
Someday I'll make a list of people who I wish would read this blog.

- 2024-05-14T12:34:04Z
If a baker may not be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding on the basis of religious freedom, surely a woman can’t be forced to give birth to an unwanted child.

Brunson as bad man or decoy - 2024-05-14T12:59:08Z

Jalen Brunson, Knicks star, after having his ass kicked in Sunday's game.

In this picture he either looks dangerous or defeated, or both. I wouldn't want to have to play against him tonight.

Here's my two cents. If Brunson has heavy legs tonight, as he clearly did in the last two games, he should be used as a decoy, to draw a double team, to free up one of the Knicks' assassins. Or maybe he'll be more effective with just one Pacer guarding him, instead of two or three.

And for crying out loud, start one of the excellent bench players, McBride or Sims or Burks, or all of them, and make sure the heroes of games 1 and 2 get plenty of rest.

- 2024-05-13T20:41:38Z
I've been trying the new 4o version of ChatGPT. It's much faster. It certainly is a search engine. And it covers news. I asked it about Michael Cohen's testimony today in the Trump trial, and it gave me a summary. I asked for the weather forecast in Kingston NY. It wouldn't give me the lyrics to Martha My Dear by the Beatles. I asked it to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.

- 2024-05-13T19:15:44Z
I can’t wait for the UIs of settings on systems like Mac or Android to go through the AIs. No more hunting through menus to not find the setting where you’re sure it should be.

- 2024-05-13T13:04:09Z
Here's where we're headed now that we have AI programming partners. Creating software will be possible the way popular music is created. Watch Get Back to get an idea. George Martin was the Beatles sherpa, the same way my AI partner is my guide through unknown programming lands. It now doesn't matter if I have less experience building MySQL apps than others. I have the collective experience of all of them here to help. My George Martin. What got me thinking about this is John Naughton's piece about AI and programming.

- 2024-05-13T13:06:51Z
The way MSNBC has contributors, I want contributors for my blog. One of the first people I'd invite is John Naughton. See next item.

- 2024-05-13T13:11:45Z
BTW, that's what my blogroll is turning into. My contributors. The people I keep an eye on through my work day. Where I get new ways of looking at the same world we're all looking at. We used to call this "watching them watch us watch them watching us etc."

- 2024-05-13T12:13:16Z
The canonical Knicks fan, a video.

- 2024-05-13T12:03:59Z
I feel like crap today, the Knicks were blown out by the Indiana team, the series is tied 2-2 but it feels much worse. The headline in the Daily News reads "Pacers blow depleted, dead-legged Knicks out of the water in Game 4, tie series 2-2." Yeah. I don't know how we recover from this loss. In a way I imagine the Knicks issuing a resignation. "It's been a great season, but we're tired. We're headed to the beach, we'll see you in October Knicks fans. Thanks for your support." I would nod my head and say "Yeah that makes sense." Whatever. I may spend today sleeping it off. Next game is tomorrow night. Yes, they will play, for sure, and yes, I will watch.

- 2024-05-13T12:09:49Z
I absolutely abhor news sites that make you turn off your ad blocker only to reveal their paywall.

- 2024-05-14T01:53:49Z
Imagine a social web without, by default, the right to drop turds where ever you like.

- 2024-05-14T01:57:47Z
FSD gets confused and does some incredibly stupid things. With ChatGPT it's amusing but with FSD it's your ass on the line.

Weather map - 2024-05-13T20:51:22Z

I asked ChatGPT to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.

Weather map.

- 2024-05-12T15:11:49Z
Today's one sentence provocation: Imagine a social web without the default right to drop turds where ever you like.

- 2024-05-12T23:02:38Z
Every social web should offer the two same author-level moderation controls that Facebook does. 1. The author can delete comments. 2. The author can say who can respond. Here are screen shots of the menu and dialog. We assume each site already has the ability to block users. No more spammer trolls.

- 2024-05-12T14:31:42Z
ChatGPT is like a worldwide encyclopedia that comes with a free librarian, 24 hours a day, who never gets tired and thinks all your questions are super insightful. I suppose everyone projects their ideal best friend on this thing. You just learned something about me. Heh. But the cool thing is it's not a yes-person, if they think you're wrong they say so. Which I really like. One more thing I'm really glad I got to be alive when this stuff came online. I feel much smarter and better organized and it's harder for me to get lost in the weeds, as I do sometimes. I guess what want next is a librarian who also is a great executive assistant. Takes notes on what I'm doing and figures out what I need to be reminded of and roughly when.

- 2024-05-12T11:58:36Z
Sometimes I just put one idea on my blog for a day and leave it at that because I think the idea is important enough on its own, and that any explanation would dilute it. Yesterday's one sentence comment was based on decades of reading the NYT, and the story told by their executive editor in a recent interview, who has imho completely lost his way. Using polls, which have proven not reliable, and are subject to manipulation by the NYT and other opinion leaders, to determine what they cover, that's marketing, not journalism. Journalism would tell us what to expect if we elect one candidate over another, if the differences are obvious, as they are in 2024. The NYT is not doing that, by its own admission, and based on observation. I ask my readers, some of whom are influential people themselves, do we accept this, and keep trying to get the NYT to understand and deliver on their responsibility, or take the problem on ourselves. I believe we have the tools and resources to do so, all we need is determination.

- 2024-05-11T22:57:51Z
The NYT is no more about news than the Repubs are about governing.

- 2024-05-11T01:57:54Z
Pretty sure I understand why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky. The mistake they made at Twitter was taking responsibility for enforcing decorum, which is completely diseconomic. A fully decentralized system is very different. That was why he funded Bluesky, to make a social web that wouldn't have at its center a company responsible for content.

- 2024-05-10T15:30:45Z
This year's Knicks are as memorable as the 1970 team. Brunson, DiVincenzo, Hart, Anunoby and Hartenstein. They have totally distinct superpowers. Tonight's game will be played without Brunson and Anunoby, both injured. That means McBride and Atchiuwa start, probably. I kept wanting to tell friends about these guys, they're just as exciting as the starters. And don't forget there's another center and forward still on the bench who have done real starting minutes this year and two years ago. They are Knicks too.

- 2024-05-10T12:27:41Z
A useful thread, where people share answers to a request for "an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind."