Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times.

The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim -- who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot.

That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. ;-)

BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).

With any luck this will be the last of the tests for this particular feature.

If this continues to work, tomorrow or Monday I'll switch it over to cross-posting to daveverse instead of the throw-away test site.

Below are the debugging messages I used today. Nothing really happening here. ;-)

• This is one of those days I am pretty sure I have nothing to write but as I get going I'll remember stuff. Maybe. As you've probably surmised I'm still working on tests. These are called regression tests. Yesterday I got the whole thing running, but knew I still had to move things around, and turn some features off that weren't needed. So every time I do one of those things that could shake things up, I have to try it again to make sure I didn't break it. This is the page I have to look at for the result. The cool thing is that the wordpress site is starting to feel like scripting.com, the software runs that quickly. But there are a lot of bits of software running all over the place that have to work in order for it to feel that solid.
• How did the regression test go? Wellll, I did break a bunch of stuff. But I put the pieces back in place. And with any luck this post will show up on the other end. It did.

Google tries to speak for me.

Reading a friend's email, I click the Reply button, and without asking, it writes a reply for me. Thus, if I want to speak for myself first I have to delete the message it created, signed with my name, w/o permission.

Here's a screen shot with a red arrow pointing to the AI's writing.

I do my own writing, always, and forever. I'm not a Luddite, btw -- if you read my blog I try tech and I use it if it fits. I'm looking for new things tech can do. But this time I was forced to use something I never wanted to use. That disgusts me. How dare the machine think it can impersonate me.

But it gets worse. They buried the opt-out settings, and they don't actually turn anything off. I asked ChatGPT how to do it. It showed me where the settings are, I turned them off, saved changes, reloaded the page, and the same suggestion is there. It's still speaking for me.

Now they certainly haven't rolled this feature out to journalists, because the news would be full of rage. Journalists, like other literate people, generally have the basic ability to speak for themselves. And journalists use a pulpit that Google is probably still a tiny bit scared of.

Also, it's hard to come up with an example you can share publicly because it only does this with replies to emails from people you know. I tried it with spam-like messages and there it is willing to let you speak for yourself.

This raises a philosophical question for Google and its AI bot. Of what use are users?

On its surface Pocket Casts is a straightforward podcasting client. You use it on a mobile device to subscribe to shows, choose the ones you want to listen to, those go into a queue, you can move things up the list, or start another, etc.

It also has a web client you can use to add and remove subscriptions, from your desktop. This is important because we discover podcasts on the desktop too. In your normal web surfing you may see a podcast you want to follow. Then how many steps does it take to add that to your subscription list on your phone? That's the trick in software design, is it too much work to justify the benefit? If it is, you won't do it. But if we can make it easy, as easy as subscribing to a news feed, you might. Ideally it should be one click followed by a confirmation.

How could this work? A new feature for OPML subscription lists. Today it's used as the import/export format for lists. But that's a one-time thing. Instead I want to give Pocket Casts the URL of an OPML file with my podcast subscriptions from the desktop.

The same feature could be used to share my choices with other people. I already publish a podcast subscription list with the world, or Jon Stewart could share his favorite podcasts by comedians. And when he adds or removes a feed, that change is synchronized with the all the users who subscribe to it.

The short version is "subscribing to subscription lists."

I decided to write up this idea publicly because I've written about the idea so many times, it's not a secret and if I had a podcast client it would already be there. If people at Automattic are excited by the potential, let's start planning the feature, and software that can plug in on the other side of the interface. I'm still learning how this works, to collaborate with a very diverse organization, spread all over the world, and they don't even all work for the same company.

If we do this feature, first it'll be largely experimental, something that podcast-loving devs will make for ourselves. As we use it we will think of ways to make it easier to use. It won't take long imho before this is a popular feature in podcast clients.