Update on MyStatusTool development

The MyStatusTool project was on hold for a period of weeks while I was developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog (and specifically for John Philpin). That appears to be working at least for John and me, so I am resuming work on this project. In conversations with Colin Walker (developer of MST-PHP), I am planning to move to update my user interface to match Colin’s, so our tools will be more common to users. I made a start on this by getting the simple version of username/password authentication using Passport.js set up (since my initial version did not have this). I have also spent some time familiarizing myself with how MST-PHP styles its user interface. The following is my projected list of tasks:

Login feature (in progress)

Display static set of feed items on home page

Display items on login page

Read feeds, add to posts file, update display on home and login page

Create admin page to manage feeds

Add posting feature and create a feed for posts

Add static pages for each post

My thoughts on the current AI explosion

For some time now, people have been exploring public AI models like DALL-E and GPT-3/GPT-4. From the software development standpoint, it appears that with the correct prompts, these models can generate source code that can do 80-90% of what you want (for specific tasks). Simon Willison has a great walkthrough of one of his experiments. Another area is training models on your own data. Dave Winer is working with Chat Thing to create his own personal chatbot which can answer questions about the content he has published since 1994 (Ton Ziljstra has shared some thoughts on this topic). I don’t think that these types of applications will be replacing programmers just yet, but they are already helping programmers be more productive. The uptick of people using these apps to create content is somewhat troubling, I would say the “jury is still out” on those types of use cases.

Where were you when Trump was indicted?

I was checking my email between 2:50pm and 3:00 pm on Friday, March 30, 2023. I got an email alert from the New York Times:

NYT email newsletter

I then went to check CNN:

CNN screenshot

This was followed by the headline I predicted months ago:

CNN screenshot

Confirmed also by NBC News:

This morning, the Queens Eagle gave its summary:
Queens Eagle screenshot

Hopefully, now that New York has gotten the ball rolling, the US DOJ and Fulton County, GA can release their indictments soon…

I posted a question on Dave Winer’s chatbot about fat pages, got a decent response!

Frank McPherson would like a personal search engine for his writing rather than an AI. I don’t think I have enough online writing to make use of an AI of my writing.