It's even worse than it appears..
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search.#
Democrats could have been#
  • Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes. #
  • And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic. #
  • People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be: #
  • The first question could be:#
    • Do you have your birth certificate or passport?#
  • In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed. #
  • And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law. #
  • They might want to keep things as they are.#
Mozilla could have been#
  • I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.#
  • Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.#
  • For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.#
Memory lane for Frontier users#
  • I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved. #
  • So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.#
  • The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.#
  • Here's a screen shot of the domains folder. #
  • Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc. #
  • This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots. #
Online suckage is everywhere#
  • The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do. #
  • It's another freaking algorithm.#
  • Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know. #
  • Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing. #
  • First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.#
  • AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.#
  • And how mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer or Soul-Sucker or You-Cuck. Then at least you'd know why you're there. :-)#
  • BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts here where no such limits prevail. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them. #

© copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.

Last update: Tuesday March 24, 2026; 5:51 PM EDT.

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