If you read this blog, I hope you'll take the time to listen to yesterday's podcast. It's all about WordPress, a product that you won't read much about on this blog, going back through the archive. I wasn't paying attention until 2023 when I began to see what an amazing product it is, not just for 2004 when it came out, but in 2024. My theory is that it's the basis for an incredible social web platform, much better than Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and of course Twitter. That's what I'm talking about for 1/2 hour in this podcast. If you give me that much time, I'll change the way you see the world, or at least the way you see me. I think I'm right about this, with another layer on top of the WordPress foundation, it becomes newly relevant, and very timely, in ways that as far as I know, no one has been pushing it. I think for example that Ghost and Substack should be built on top of WordPress. The fact that they aren't gives a clue as to how portable your work is there, and how little choice you get in writing tools. Anyway, please make the time to listen. This is pivotal, and I don't think I'll ever be able to spell it out in writing, it's pure storytelling. Thanks!#

I started a thread for questions and comments re the podcast.#

Podcast: How I view WordPress.#

Started a new support repo for Bingeworthy. #

Just found an exponential memory leak at the database level in Bingeworthy. I have never seen one of these in all my years of programming. A data structure that saves a copy of itself in itself. So every time it saved it became exponentially bigger. Until it made the SQL server crash because the JSON object it was storying was over the limit of JSON objects. Crashed the freaking server. Fixed. Feels good. #

As part of the conversion of BingeWorthy, I started the database from scratch, but before I did that, I exported all the data and put it in a GitHub repo. This included a JSON file of ratings for each user. For example, this is my file. Remember we used Twitter identity then, davewiner is my Twitter username, just replace my name with yours to see your file, if you were a Bingeworthy user in the past. #

I wrote this post in 2023 as Threads was coming online. Now that Zuckerberg has thrown us under the bus, again, it's worth remembering their rollout strategy was to get us to overlook their past betrayals of users. They said "We ❤️ Fediverse." That did it. It was at a moment of fear of Twitter, now owned by Musk, and a belief in the story of ActivityPub, that it would create an open social web. Zuck said "we're on board." Now it's expedient to say to another group that he sees things their way, and it just so happens to be the very people most people who were looking to get away from in 2023 when he was loving the Fediverse. Now we're doing the same thing with Bluesky. And it's going to happen again. There will be a moment when you look back on your "hope for the best" approach and realize that it didn't work, and if I'm around I will remind you again. We have to roll up our sleeves and make an open social web that can't be sold out. When you build value for other people, they will use it for their advantage, leaving you with nothing. That's business. There are no companies that are different, not Apple, not anyone. More in a thread on Bluesky.#

2023: "If they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them."#

Liberals should support truly open technology that doesn't have a Zuckerberg who can sell us all out. Get involved.#

Has anyone come up with a variant of JSON that allows comments? I've started using names like "comment1" etc to shoehorn comments in. A complete hack, impossible to maintain over time. The idea of not being able to put notes in your config.json files is absolutely ridiculous. #

I wish the Ecmascript committee had put more effort into real soul-saving enhancements like comments in JSON instead of coming up with contorted ways to do the same old contortions we got used to dealing with ten years ago. And they could have removed features from the language instead of piling on more and more random reinventions. End of editorial, now on with the new Bingeworthy. #

The great thing about using a system like MySQL (or any SQL for that matter) is that it's been around for so long that if you can think of something that would be nice to have, you can be sure it's there somewhere. They've had enough time not only to hit all the walls, but to try out different approaches and settle on one. Maybe at times there were competing ways to do things, like the way Bluesky and ActivityPub, and probably Threads, and certainly Facebook and Twitter insist on reinventing RSS. But when I ask ChatGPT "can you do this in MySQL" it gives me one or two ways to do it, but usually just one. These are things I never would have found in the old Google-search way of finding answers. An example, I wanted to find out if there was a MySQL way to query a value inside a JSON object, and the answer is (of course) yes. And you can create an index on such a value. I didn't even ask for it, ChatGPT volunteered, guessing it would be my next question (it was). Whatever happened in the evolution of SQL it was a lot healthier than what's going on now in the social web, where the creators completely ignored what came before, and each other, and as a result there's a proliferation of different ways to do things we've known how to do for over 20 years. SQL has been around for 50, so maybe they went through this stage and emerged from it with a better answer. This feels a bit like the Fermi paradox and I'm a time traveler who has managed to witness 50 years of evolution long after the fact, any day of any week I want to thanks to ChatGPT. Also this is why it is so important to keep the archives of the 1990's web preserved. We may need to loop back to this when the people responsible for the social web decide that interop is important as opposed to each of them going it alone. #

How I'd write books with WordLand. Just thinking out loud here. Working with a group of people. It's possible it's just the author and editor, or it could be a larger documentation job, or a report covering a lot of ground. In 2025 we'd use AI to find the threads in our writing, to maintain a book outline that changes as our writing goes forward. Gone is the problem of writing a chapter structure before doing any writing. I've always found that to be a real obstacle to getting started. I've yet to use a ChatGPT-like service to do this, but I expect it can be done. I'm thinking about how I can set up an experiment for WordLand for writing this kind of book. The first test case could be the docs for WordLand. I would write a post about a feature as I thought about it, but not worry about how it fits into the rest of the book. Trust the AI organizer to help us do something sensible. #

Update: Bluesky images work again and thus the Great Art on Bluesky channel is back. If you're on Bluesky please subscribe. #

The crazy thing about Bluesky's API is they took already standardized things like links and enclosures, and after 20+ years came up with new definitions. Makes our apps more expensive to maintain, and we waste time and human wear and tear on stupid bullshit make-work. Developers are people, and our work is already horribly overly complex, we're working at the edge of comprehension, and what the fukc let's throw some more unnecessary complication into the mix. Arrogance, narcissism, whatever the source is, it's not a good way to introduce yourself. And, even better, after you go through the maze they break it, with an error message about legacy blob bullshit. They've already done this, and they're just getting started. It's why I say they should just adapt to RSS instead of trying to force us to adapt to them. I'll do it one more time, and then that's it. They can fix my code next time they break it. #

BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don't do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don't deprecate. They're still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is "Let's not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop." People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you're a developer you don't understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don't reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn't be having this friction. Their API is bullshit. Plain and simple. They even thought of using RSS constructs and decided to reinvent the whole thing. There are places to innovate, like new freedom for users and developers, or there are ways to create hamster cages where everyone gets to run around in a very tightly defined space, that's fun. That's what Twitter was about, and that's what Bluesky is doing too. At some point we're really going to break free of this mess, but this isn't that time, yet.#

Just taking it easy. Thinking about stuff. Will resume blogging soon. 😄#

BTW, as promised, last night's Knicks game was great. Up until the end, when the other guys took over and sadly the Knicks lost. We need a stronger bench. The starting five are great but they're not totally super-human. #

Knicks on Friday night: A big offline day here in the mountains, the show will resume tomorrow bright and early, Murphy-willing. Enjoy tonight's Knicks game in OKC. Should be a great game. 😄#

I wrote a few blog posts in WordLand this morning because it was convenient. It's good the same way I like to use a twitter-like app to write first drafts, when all I have to type into is my iPad. I've also started using it on my desktop for short things, but I just wrote and edited a complete blog post, a response to something Krugman wrote, about how gambling is destroying sports. And what for? It's like what Marge said at the end of Fargo. "There's more to life than a little money, you know." It feels like they're feeding the NBA into a wood chipper. What comes out the other side won't imho be recognizable as sport. And here you are, and it's a beautiful day.#

Welcome to a brand new year. The best one ever. 😄#

I've archived December in the GitHub repo, in OPML, as usual.#

I've got so much new stuff stacked up, on its way out. Hold onto your hats. #

After his death at 100 on Sunday, the news has been full of talk about Jimmy Carter. It's not polite to say it's exhausting and boring, and seems pointless. Then I happened to hear Jimmy Carter himself, on the latest episode of the Fresh Air podcast, and that was fantastic and totally worthwhile. It had been a long time since I listened to him, and I've grown a lot since then. Listen to the person, much more interesting than people talking about the person.#

In addition to a $20 per month ChatGPT account, I also have a full Gemini account because I bought a snazzy new Pixel 9 Pro which comes with one year of Gemini included. So far that's just meant that I get pop up dialogs all over the place telling me I can use Gemini with Gmail, Google Drive and whatever else. Honestly it's just annoying. I do not want these apps to do my writing for me. Please. That imho is not a valuable use of AI. I can write for myself thank you very much.#

Braintrust query: I'm kind of stuck with my little feed reader in Bluesky. It works, but a few hours into it, at 10PM last night, we start getting rate-limit errors from bluesky. If it really is a rate limit, shouldn't reset after a while?#

Still looking for WordLand testers who write good bug reports and use WordPress for writing on a regular basis, even daily. #

Braintrust query: Do you subscribe to one or more AI services?#

I'm playing with using Bluesky as a very simple feed reader. 1. Running up against its lack of style and formatting. Very bare bones. Not sure if people will like. 2. What's the rate limit? My app is getting rate-limited with not very many posts. (According to their docs on rate limits, I don't think my project is anywhere near the limit. It's creating posts. I'll start counting them, I guess.) #

Here's a list of all the feeds in my blogroll, with links to the XML version. I've wanted to have a nice non-XML way of viewing the feeds in an OPML subscription list. I took the time today to put one together. I had all the pieces, it was just a matter of putting them all in one place. You can use it if you want, if you want to show someone what feeds are in an OPML subscription list. Screen shot.#

I can't get it out of my head that today is Monday. That's how it computes in my brain. This time of year is very confusing that way. #

It took me a long time to figure out that when people respond to you on twitter-like systems they aren't actually speaking to you, they're talking over your shoulder to the masses they imagine are reading what you posted. Three comments. 1. There are no masses. You can see this by looking at the stats for each tweet, available on most platforms. 2. Most users on the social web are trying to get attention for themselves, the only reason they read the posts is to see if there's a place for them to attach their message. 3. A simple tweak to the software would make it so that only the author of the post being responded to could see the replies. Then they could RT a reply if they thought everyone should see it. This would make the social web a lot more useful imho.#

Idea: Pipe new posts from feeds in my blogroll list to Bluesky.#

Peeve: A podcast uses a siren as a sound effect. It causes panic when driving. "Where's the siren!" the driver looks everywhere, only to realize it was just the podcast. This has happened a few times, this time I remembered to say something. #

We should be thinking about a new SQL that's much higher level. Another layer. Get all the efficiencies of a 50+ year platform, with all the understanding gained at the top level in all that time. Most of the learning I did in the last five years can be hidden behind a much simpler programming interface, imho. It's worth trying factor, again imho.#

BTW, as a longtime speaker of English and programmer, I think the term refactoring is re-dundant. The term comes from mathematics where you simplify a statement without altering its truth. Factoring is a repetitive process. You factor, and then factor some more if you can. #

The problem with everyone who says you have to get off Twitter is that we're giving up the meeting place we had and spreading all the bits into the wind. Are you going to leave the United States now that Trump is going to be president again? Leaving Twitter is a lot like that. How do you know Musk isn't going to have to sell it? Might happen. How would you feel then about having quit Twitter in a huff as if it would always be the bastion of assholes. It's a mistake. He isn't making money with it. The more you use it the more it costs him, btw. By leaving you might actually be helping him survive. Nothing is so linear, first big point. Second big point, no one cares about your gestures. #

If you think woke is the problem, try reading the US Constitution and amendments. Really read them. Pretend you didn't know it was the Constitution. One woke idea after another. Basically if you don't believe in woke, you're in the wrong freaking country. #

Last night's email had a YouTube video in it. I had forgotten that they get lost somewhere in the email delivery supply chain, so the fire that I put in the email was not transmitted. It's even worse than it appears. Here's a link to the video of the fire, with any luck that will get through in tonight's email. Happy holidays everyone! #

Happy holidays everyone. Here's a nice fire to keep you warm. ❤️ #

I am ready to start programming ChatGPT, the same way I have built my own code writing and deploying software on Macintosh. I want to create rules in some kind of macro language that it will never violate. I find it has huge problems with memory, it says it's remembering something, but has forgotten it 24 hours later. This is like the Fail Whale in the early days of Twitter. Cute, because the system is doing something so new, futuristic and useful, but after a while it's not cute because we're using the system for real work. The web is programmable, our operating systems are, of course the AI-o-verse will be programmable too. We are able to create entirely new development environments, these platforms deserve a fresh new look at everything. I'd also like to note that at the same time, the platforms are breaking through in web user interfaces. Remarkable progress. Far beyond what we were doing in the very stagnant Web 2.0 world. They're still stuck on whether or not our writing can have titles. So bizarre to exist in a world that is deliberately hobbled, and another with infinite horizons. Anyway this is what I'm thinking about just before hunkering down with my Knicks and popcorn, a Christmas tradition for many many years. Ho ho ho. #

Talking with a friend about the listening lists idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular podcast client to get the pump primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince. This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep beating the drum, and if it's the right idea and when it's the right time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of the network, but at this time I don't own a podcast client, and that's the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep beating the drum.#

Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you'll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can't be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that's how you know you're in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now -- none of the popular ones qualify. None. #

How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer's web. Put the two together and we will have finally, after 30+ years, delivered on the promise of the web. #

I have a fairly large and old C application that was written to run on the Mac and Windows. I still use it today on a relatively modern Macintosh. I wonder if it will soon be possible to turn this project over to an AI like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity or some other, to convert it to run on Linux, where it should be able to run in perpetuity, or at least a lot longer than on the Macintosh. I would be willing to pay a few thousand dollars to do this work. #

Instead of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as important, are not. End arguments about whether the Dems are this color or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle possible. #

I wrote this piece in WordLand yesterday morning over breakfast. Started writing it as a Bluesky post, quickly ran out of space so I switched over to my own TLTB, and it's very conducive to writing flow, which is its purpose. Then I did the same thing this morning. Sorry to keep talking about the product without it being in general release yet. I want to get it right before opening it up. Still a bunch of things I want to add/fix.#

I love writing my morning missives in WordLand. It really fits. #

What we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. A system as capable as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can't be guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly. Its vision is to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and quickly understood as parallel to Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what's needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than Twitter is today and I expect that to continue. #

BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over. #

I like to share posts from Threads on Bluesky and Mastodon to illustrate the incompatibility, the ignorance of one to the other. These guys should all be using the same protocol. It's a travesty that each of them considers their product to define the social web -- they don't understand the first thing about the web, what the miracle the web was. Before the web, the tech world was as it is now, fragmented by huge companies that didn't care about anything but their own internal drama. The last thing they would consider was reusing something that was already running. While all that was going on Unix basically agreed on a core set of functions that formed a basis for interop. They weren't perfect, there were differences in each of the Unixes, but you could reuse most of what you knew on each of the platforms. But Apple, Microsoft, Sun and IBM each ran their own ecosystems. And then one day along came the web. Instead of bookshelves of docs, it wasn't even a booklet. You could be up and running with a "website" in ten minutes. I speak from experience. My first website was authored with a freaking email. Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are the IBM, Microsoft and Apple of 2024. It's ridiculous if they think this is a web. To paraphrase the late great Lloyd Bentsen, I knew the web, the web was a friend of mine. You are not the web. #

I've been alternating days here on my blog. One day, lots of posts, maybe even a podcast. And then a quiet day. Today started out quiet, and then the ideas started flowing. #

Programming work: I was trying to work out a feature for WordLand that isn't cooperating, having to do with the clipboard and the MediumEditor package, which does all these nice things for us with the clipboard, but it isn't willing to share custody, or perhaps more accurately we can't figure out how to. The feature I want is when you paste a URL and there's a selection, the selected text is turned into a link. A video explanation. I've burned two full sessions on this, seeking advice from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. They all pretend to know what to do, but in fact they don't. The clipboard is one of those areas of the browser that is held together with rumors and confusion, as is MediumEditor, and the intersection is rumors and confusion squared. Tomorrow I'm going to work on other things, and the day after until I have an idea for another way to approach this. I really want this feature because apparently it's supported in Slack, WordPress and other software that supports links. #

BTW, we could use a few more testers with good experience with bug reporting who use WordPress. I'm sure there are more bugs we haven't gotten reports on yet. #

I've figured out more precisely what WordLand is meant to compete with --> the tiny little text boxes of the social web. Ours is slightly bigger, and grows as your piece gets longer. Neatly arranged like the others, and all your writing flows through WordPress and RSS, where each of the TLTBs only flows into their limited and incompatible views of the social web. RSS and WordPress are a powerful distribution system. Lots of software works with those two protocols, as do many programmers, and they're both marvelously open, stable over more than twenty years each, and can't be owned by billionaires. Pretty powerful place, kind of amazing that there's so much room here, and the people are friendly. 😄#

Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.#

One more thing. I love taking the time to craft a delicious piece of software. I have never really done that in the 50 years I've been doing this. This time I decided there's no rush. I'm going to wait until people want what I've created. We're not there yet. 😄#

Podcast: ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It rewrites your code to conform to its standards. It has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic features. #

A tuneup for WordLand confirms that it's publishing.#

I'm thinking maybe we'll do a Kickstarter for WordLand. It'll cost money to run the server and continue to develop the sofware. It fills a big enough need to ask the users to support it financially, at least to get it off the ground. The server is open source so theoretically anyone can run one. But in practice most people will probably just want to use the service. I just want to solve this problem so we can start building a developer ecosystem around WordPress that it's never had. Think of WordLand as a pump primer. 😄#

I watched Ari Melber last night and noted he isn't yet on Bluesky or hasn't updated his show graphics to include it? He usually tries to be leading edge in this, and at this point he looks a bit behind the times, imho, ymmv etc. After Melber, I stayed through the opening segment of Joy Reid and was charged up by her intro. She's clicking on all cylinders. They must be thinking about gutting or reconfiguring MSNBC at this time. It's up for sale, I wonder if a billionaire will see the wisdom of owning that piece of real estate as Musk saw the value in Twitter, far beyond what the stock market valued it at. (BTW, I should add that I benefited from his largesse, I was a very small shareholder in Twitter at the time. I did not want to sell, but my vote didn't matter. Heh.)#

I've been thinking about Blogger Of The Year for a few months, and had a choice (not yet final), but then Paul Krugman left the NYT, set up shop on Substack, and has been totally kicking ass every day for the last week. Presumably these are all things the NYT wouldn't let him run? Or if he submitted them, would they edit them into mushy nonsense. I've been there, I quit Wired when they edited my pieces, with my name on them, where I said things I thought were inane, things that I most definitely did not say. There's never been a better illustration of the importance of blogging and the value that's removed by publishing in the NYT. If a Nobel Laureate like Krugman can't get his ideas out that way, with the huge advantage in circulation they have (as Wired did over my humble blog), then there must be a reason to have blogs after all. I don't think he will be my BOTY for 2024, but maybe next year, if he keeps up the intelligent irreverence. #

I've got a new project called davegpt, it's in GitHub, open source of course. I also created a ChatGPT project with the same code. Presumably I can ask it questions about the code. Because I have a worknotes.md file in the GitHub project, ChatGPT understands where I want to take this project. Most amazing, it wrote a summary of what it saw in the project. I added that to the GitHub project, of course, and since it was in Markdown, it fit right in with no mods. The power of standards. I love it when things that should work, do. The next step is to implement a feature in the new Bingeworthy that can only be done with an AI bot like ChatGPT. It's such a thrill to be working on this stuff as it's happening. And what a delight that it has an API. I don't mind that I'm paying for it, I love the idea of paying to break down walls to create new things that couldn't have been created before. #

The Democrats are, of course, failing to lead the 75 million who voted for them in the last election, which was a bit over a month ago. Maybe they should factor that into their thinking, what kind of relationship would you have with an organization that only cared about what you thought if they needed something very specific from you in that exact moment. Any other time, who are you again? We are without leaders.#

What could journalism do to help the country? Move your shows out into the red territories. Make it a requirement that Chris and Joy, Lawrence or Rachel, if they want to stay on the air, have to broadcast from one of the red states. It could be a large city in a red state. The reason is symbolic and practical. The red state voters wouldn't be such a mystery if you knew some of them from your everyday life. And you might have a few of them on the show. You have some selling to do, the idea you're selling is that you care about the people you don't know. #

I'm farting around with the OpenAI API. I have a nice encapsulation for calls to ChatGPT, one that hides all the tricky stuff, all you need is an apiToken to make it work, something that is available for free. The first place I put it is in an outliner. Basically I can write a question in a headline, click an icon and the response from ChatGPT is placed in a series of sub-heads. Interesting to see that they use Markdown to convey the response. The logical choice. I'm not sure how or if I will use this in my writing, but now I have an idea what it's good for. Here's a screen shot of a question I asked and the answer. Also the API is very slow. A question like that would be displayed instantly in their app, in my app it takes a half minute. And I have to pay for it, whereas in their app it's all covered by my $20 a month subscription.#

I get my greatest ideas walking, riding my bike, on a ski lift, or sitting in a hot tub esp when it's really cold out and there's a full moon as there was last night. Sometimes the ideas prove workable and other times they're like the great brainstorms one had with cocaine in the 80s, not that I would know, but have heard. Anyway, I was daydreaming about what I'd do with Bingeworthy if I was going to continue working on it. I thought about the mode I want to use it in. I want to watch a series that I would like, not that Netflix thinks I'd like, because their idea of what I'd like is bullshit. I find that I'll like almost anything that's rated in the 80s by Metacritic, but really only if the NYT reviewed it well. I'll give almost any NYT critics choice a go. So what I really want in the middle of the Bingeworthy display of a program is 250 words about the program aggregated from various critics as Metacritic does so well. Unfortunately neither Metacritic or the NYT offer an API for this as far as I know. Oh too bad, same old thing. No access to the data where you need it (btw, ideally Bingeworthy would be baked into the TV set, or all the streamers could be played in the context of Bingeworthy). Anyway, then boom it hit me, holy shit the thing I was farting around with in the outliner could actually do this. Now I'm going to need to be able to call ChatGPT from a Node app. #

Interesting episode of the Daily podcast about AI in Hollywood. They specifically mention a new movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, with bodies and faces edited by AI to be various ages other than what they are (mid-late 60s). The movie Here, was rated not too great by various critics including the NYT. #

Martin Luther King Day is January 20 in 2025, also is Inauguration Day. #

What if you had a twitter-like system that was embedded in a ChatGPT-like app. What would you do with that?#

The journalism I pay attention is labeling itself as truth-based -- but it most definitely is not. When it comes to topics I am expert in, they tell a mushed up version of extreme points of view, that (surprise!) favor the continued existence of their jobs. The choice of the truth-based label is kind of a clue. 😄#

This post spawned quite a thread on Bluesky: "The AI industry could give us easy tools to build our own models, from our own archived writing, for private use. This may be a blind spot. It's as if when personal computers started, instead of spreadsheet editors, we were offered great sets of tabulated recalc'ing data. Fun to watch, maybe useful for researchers, but nothing compared to the utility of playing 'what if' on our own models."#

Deep in the thread: "I want to give a huge volume of writing to ChatGPT or something much like it, and then ask it to give me an outline of what I wrote, and allow me to massage the outline, churn out a synopsis. I'd like to see what's there, and there's far too much writing for me to do that."#