Mitch's Blog

Here’s something I saw on a 2017 business trip to San Francisco: The retro-futuristic lobby of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

The hotel was a primary location for two movies I loved: Mel Brooks’s “High Anxiety” and “Time After Time,” where Malcolm McDowell plays a time-traveling H.G. Wells.

I have no doubt that Adam Mosseri and his team are talented, hard-working and sincere about making Threads a great citizen of the fediverse. And I have little doubt that they will change those intentions or be replaced when Threads hits the final stages of the “embrace, extend, extinguish” cycle.

Several weeks ago, I switched from my fancypants Aeropress coffee setup to a simple drip machine.

Since then, every morning, I barely remember to put the carafe in before starting the coffee machine.

One day I will forget and end up with a huge wet coffee disaster on the floor.

I feel like there’s a metaphor here for the inevitability of death or some shit like that, but I can’t figure it out because I haven’t had enough coffee yet.

Filipino police freed hundreds of slaves toiling in a romance scam operation [theregister.com] — One worker, who tipped off police, was “promised a job as a chef. Police said he bore signs of torture in the form of electrocution marks.”

Thomas Friedman: What Schumer and Biden Got Right About Netanyahu [nytimes.com] — Israel needs a plan for peaceful coexistence with Palestinians after the war, and Netanyahu has nothing to offer.

A conversation with Stephanie ‘Snow’ Carruthers, Chief People Hacker at IBM X-Force Red [securityweek.com]

Her partner planned to attend DEFCON. She went with him, more for Vegas than DEFCON. But after falling asleep in a reverse engineering malware presentation (“It went completely over my head,” she explained) she was encouraged to go and find something of more interest. She did, and found a lock-picking village. Within a couple of hours, she had picked her first lock.

via

17 percent of Americans report experiencing long Covid. That is an extraordinarily high number of sick people. [usnews.com]

“How Are You? Just Give Me Your Stock Answer. No, really. I want to know your stock answer." [ironicsans.beehiiv.com] — Me: “I’m good. You?” Or, if the other person asks first, I just say, “I’m good.” Except often I forget and say, “I’m good, you?” leading to an infinite “How are you” loop.

My editor won’t sent me to to KubeCon in Paris, France. She says if KubeCon comes to Paris, Texas, she’ll talk about it.

My latest on Silverlinings: Red Hat jockeys for pole position as enterprises cloudify critical apps — Enterprises are releasing critical applications from their safe, legacy architectures and updating them for the cloud, according to a report by Red Hat and analysts at Illuminas.

My goal was simple but it eluded me for ten years.

I do a lot of linkblogging on mitchw.blog. I prefer to have links formatted like this:

How Many Steps Do You Really Need? That’s the Wrong Question. Walking is important, but challenging yourself to go faster and higher can improve your health even more. nytimes.com

It’s esthetically pleasing, and the reader can see which website they’re being directed to. It’s the way Dave Winer formats it on the links page of his Scripting News blog, which is where I got the idea. I like it.

However, formatting links that way is just fussy enough that it’s inconvenient, particularly when I’m reading and blogging from the iPad and iPhone. I looked for automated tools that would work with my existing blogging software to create those links. Currently, I’m blogging on Micro.blog; previously I used WordPress. But I couldn’t find anything that worked quite the way I wanted.

Then I thought: Why not let ChatGPT try? I’d heard ChatGPT made an excellent coding assistant. Why not see if ChatGPT could do the whole thing?

So I did. You can read a transcript of my conversation with ChatGPT here, complete with code snippets, or read on here and I’ll walk you through it.

Getting started

I started by asking ChatGPT4:

I’m looking for a tool that would automatically convert URLs for posting to the web, to strip off everything but the domain and then link to the URL from the domain. The output should be in Markdown format. For example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-by-sea.html would become nytimes.com

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-set-finalize-rnc-takeover-051211725.html would become news.yahoo.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorgos_Lanthimos would become en.wikipedia.org

You can see an example of that style of linking on this page: http://scripting.com/?tab=links

ChatGPT replied with a Python script that would do the job. I would have to edit the script manually to change the URLs.

A good start, but not what I was looking for.

I thought about using Drafts, a utility for the Mac, iPad and iPhone designed to be the place “where text starts.” You type some text into Drafts and then send the text to email, messages, Slack, your task manager, WordPress, whatever. It’s extremely customizable; users can write automations, known as Actions, to manipulate text or send notes to other apps.

I told ChatGPT:

Write me a plugin for the Drafts app that does the same thing using a URL in a draft. Here is the Drafts app https://getdrafts.com

ChatGPT wrote a Drafts action, along with instructions how I could install it. I ran the plugin and got an error. So I sent the error message to ChatGPT, which explained the problem to me and rewrote the code.

And it worked. The whole process took just a few minutes.

But then I ran into a glitch. Here’s how I explained it to ChatGPT:

Please modify the JavaScript so that if the URL starts with www, the www is not included in the output. For example, if the input is this:

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans https://www.kpbs.org/news/national/2024/03/08/immigrants-are-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-u-s-born-americans-studies-find

The output is currently this:

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans www.kpbs.org

Instead, it should be this:

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans kpbs.org

ChatGPT revised the code to check for the presence of www in the URL, and remove that string if present. I updated the Drafts Action yet again, and it worked.

How about link previews?

Next, I asked ChatGPT to write an action that would generate a link preview in a post, in the style of Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, etc. I got that idea from the recent kottke.org redesign.

ChatGPT told me it could do that partially, but couldn’t fetch the title of the web page automatically because Drafts can’t access the Internet.

I replied:

You are incorrect. Drafts can extract the title. See this action for example code. directory.getdrafts.com/a/13y You’ll want to use open graph to get the information for the preview. Try again please.

ChatGPT corrected itself and generated an action for me. I got error messages and passed them on to ChatGPT, which corrected the action. We went back and forth until we generated an action that worked successfully. However, the output was ugly and I lost interest. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day.

Back to plan A

I returned to the original problem and asked ChatGPT for a slight modification.

Me: Let’s go back to the “Convert URLs to markdown” Drafts action. Ready to do a little more work on that one?

ChatGPT: Of course! Let’s continue working on the “Convert URLs to Markdown” Drafts action. What adjustments or additions would you like to make?

Me: I’d like to modify that script so there are brackets surrounding the domain link, with the brackets inside the link.

I provided an example, which included an escape character, \, in front of the square brackets, because I thought that was necessary to render the text properly.

ChatGPT responded with the correct code—which did not include the escape character, because it’s unnecessary.

You can read my conversation with ChatGPT in its entirety here.

I’m pleased by this, and I have a couple of ideas for other Drafts actions ChatGPT can create for me to automate blog and social media formatting.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

“Our cousin lives in Jupiter, Florida so you can imagine my 8yo’s disappointment once we arrived.”— @ihidefrommykids

iPhone weather app, at noon: “Buckle up, motherfucker, you and your house are flying to Kansas!”

Same weather app a few minutes ago: Um, no biggie, but you might get some light rain in a few minutes. Or not. Either way, don’t worry about it."

Amount of rain and wind received in the intervening 3.5 hours: Zero.

It’s sunny and clear and I just got a weather alert to expect severe thunderstorms in 40 minutes. WTF?

The air does smell ozoney, though.

I’ve been using Vivalidi as my primary browser on the Mac for a few months now.

I started using Vivaldi because it seemed to be the most efficient at handling multiple tabs. My 5-1/2-year-old MacBook Pro wheezes and staggers if I have more than four or five tabs open in Safari. Vivaldi handles a dozen tabs with ease, and when the MacBook starts straining, Vivaldi lets me hibernate background tabs.

I also like several other features in Vivaldi. I’m learning to use Workspaces, which seem to be a more manageable alternative to having multiple windows open. I also like the command palette.

Last week, I started using Vivaldi for iOS as my primary browser on my iPhone. That’s my first time using anything other than Safari as the default iPhone browser. Other browsers seem too rough, most likely because of iOS restrictions on using alternative browser engines.

In the next few months, I expect I’ll get a new MacBook and might go back to Safari then. Or maybe not—I like Vivaldi.

I’m trying to be more mindful about adding articles to my read-it-later list. It becomes just another to-do list to add stress to my brain. I want to stop adding “that might be interesting” articles to the list. But that’s hard to do because those articles, well, might be interesting.

My latest on Silverlinings: Oracle climbs to the hyperscaler A-list — Oracle’s growth and multi-cloud strategy elevates it to the big leagues. Its deeper partnership with Microsoft will burnish the Crimson Cloud Conglomerate’s shine.

Read to the end for a failed comparison to “Goodfellas.”

I tried steel-cut oats for my morning oatmeal and the texture was like tiny styrofoam pellets. Not recommended.