Scripting News: Thursday, November 20, 2025

I’m working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, and if any have changed, we broadcast the message that the item has changed. I’m doing a complete review of this, based on actual data, and found there were a fair number of places we were calling a change, when nothing that mattered had changed. Now I’m debating whether or not a pubDate change should be seen as an item change. My initial thought when we were working on RSS, was that the pubDate should never change. In the real world of publishing I don’t think the publication date changes. Right? Of course some feeds do change the pubDate because that’s the art of feeds (sorry for the sarcasm). But I don’t think FeedLand should call that a change. Wondering what other feed developers do? So I asked ChatGPT. This is incredibly valuable research. One thing I learned is that people use atom:updated. It’s true RSS 2.0 has no item that says when an item updated. Anyway net-net, the consensus is that a change in pubDate is not a change. I don’t think I’m going to make it immutable though. #

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first. #