Scripting News: Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

The NYT is suing ChatGPT for ingesting their archive. I understand why they would sue now, for legal reasons, but before they had their own service up, assuming they are developing one, it's kind of selfish of them to keep the Times content out of the mix. We're failing at a number of big challenges (climate, guns, abortion, democracy, racial hate, wars), with everyone's future at stake. They could grant ChatGPT a license until at least they had their own product up. That would send the right message, our journalism is an aid to our survival, and we wanted to be sure you had access to the paper of record, now and in the future. Instead they want to take their data out of the mix, and who knows if they ever plan to get it back in. This is a far cry from the NYT that helped get our news systems on the web established in the 90s and 00s. #

I'm going to write rebuttals to important Wikipedia pages that get the story wrong. In the past this was pointless, because search engines ranked them so high, but now I find that ChatGPT figures out the real story somehow, almost always, even if Wikipedia is wildly wrong. I figure our blogging helps. #

news.scripting.com#

Okay the new version of news.scripting.com is up. #

Here's what's new.#

When you click on a tab, we change the URL in the address bar to point to the tab, the same way we do on the Scripting News home page. If you bookmark that link, you'll go to that tab.#
Click the white-on-orange XML icon to get an OPML subscription list for the feeds with the category of the current selected tab. #
The four buttons below each item now work. #
It should work reasonably well on phones and tablets.#
It's served with HTTPS because in upcoming versions you'll be able to log in. #

And that's about it, in terms of visible features. Behind the scenes there's a new tab manager. I figured since all my apps use tabs these days, I should make the investment of having a single tab manager that has all the bells and whistles, invoked by setting an option.#

The customary screen shot. #

A thread for any questions.#

Linkblog items for the day.

1996: CNN On Your Desktop. My writeup of PointCast. It should totally be in the timeline for the development of RSS. scripting.com

NY to issue nearly 1,500 new weed business licenses in coming weeks. gothamist.com

Tom Smothers, Half of the Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86. nytimes.com

Jon Postel's robustness principle. wikipedia.org

NYT Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.'s Use of Copyrighted Work. nytimes.com

Pointcast was an early prototype for the applications that were built around RSS. openai.com

I Much Prefer Life in Vietnam to Texas, As a Foreign Teacher. businessinsider.com

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