Scripting News: Tuesday, June 4, 2024
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What got me spinning was listening to Rachel Maddow advertise her podcast at the beginning of her show last night. You can get the podcast for free, she says, or if you want no ads, you can pay some money and get it from Apple. What Apple is selling there, and Maddow is going along with, is not a freaking podcast and by calling it one they undermine a great medium. I understand why Maddow might not care, she makes millions from a medium that doesn't give users much choice (ie MSNBC) so why should she care about podcasting, which does. #
The test for whether it's a podcast or not is if they say you can get it "Wherever you get your podcasts." If they can say that, it's a podcast. If you have to get it from Apple or YouTube or whoever, it's not a podcast. That's the rule.#
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In other words the designers of CSS and JavaScript and probably every other technology everyone uses had no idea what actual developers were doing with their committee-designed creation. They made mistakes and piled them on each other, fixing old mistakes with new mistakes. After 30 years of evolving in this convoluted way, if you want to create useful software, you have to either master all of it (and no one has) or pay $20 a month to OpenAI so you can use it to navigate the awful hairball that the web platform has become. Where we only have a sliver of knowledge as humans, the machine knows all of it. And that's just programming. I'm just guessing that everything is that way. You know the part in The Matrix Reloaded where we're told no one knows how the technology works. That's where we are now. Spend your whole life using the stuff and you still only know a tiny fraction of what you need to make good software. We needed what ChatGPT does, but we didn't know we needed it. That's where we are now, and the journos are sitting on the sidelines hurling spitballs at it. #
Instead of "Donald Trump" we should always say "Convicted felon Donald Trump."#
It's branding and it works. He's right. #
I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of an interviewer hallucinating during a news show with several distinguished panelists discussing an important issue.#
Linkblog items for the day.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. goodreads.com
I asked ChatGPT the life expectancy of a 77-year old obese man who gets no exercise and eats horrible food. chatgpt.com
In the Former Eastern Bloc, They're Terrified of a Trump Presidency. newrepublic.com
When ChatGPT can read my blog. This is what I've wanted since long before ChatGPT existed. I can't imagine what the privacy concerns are. Everything on my blog is by definition public. smays.com
Don't let MAGA theatrics fool you: convicted felon Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions are not helping him. salon.com
OpenAI Says ChatGPT Suffering Major Outage. macrumors.com
The homeowner mutiny leaving Florida vulnerable to hurricanes. grist.org
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