Scripting News: Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've seen it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing the output of an app so other apps can use it as input. Another thing AI apps have in common with work we've done in the past is the ability to script apps, which was one of the big features of Frontier esp on the Mac starting in the early 90s. This started out just for desktop apps but worked just as well for web apps, once that opportunity became available. I felt strongly that the Mac with it's very functional GUI could benefit from a powerful system-level scripting language with the UI objects being scriptable, and the data of the apps accessible via script. That kind of duality is still a common theme in computer work, I'm doing the same kind of thing with WordPress, as the OS for the web, and making it possible to create different UIs in ways that earlier social web apps can't. I think that functionality as with the others will pair very nicely with ChatGPT and its cousins. #Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s. I wrote a quick Mastodon post about this. So many stories to tell about each of these projects. Looking at the list and realize we got all those people to work together. They don't talk about that when the write the history, but that is the real accomplishment. There is so much really good tech that ends up lost to history because people wouldn't open their eyes and see that they weren't alone. That might be the biggest flaw in the design of our species, that it's so rare that we get together on the way things should work. Other examples -- MP3, QuickDraw, HTML. And so much time wasted replacing things that already worked fine. (Think of all the programming languages invented in the last 20 years. What a waste of resources. No doubt the AI's have already created a meta-language to compile all that code into. If they could think, what would they think of us for not paying attention to each other.)#
for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?" #
apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated. #
Linkblog items for the day
Homeland Security is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics. techcrunch.com
They miss their sites' comments. techdirt.com
Democrats have a constitutional power they aren't using to fight back: state resolutions. theguardian.com
Top Substack writers depart for Patreon. niemanlab.org
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