Yesterday Ben Thompson
wrote that we've reached the end of the web, and I had come to the same conclusion, just a few days ago. And his piece, which was a great milestone, said it's not totally gone, because of the advent of AI we can build small systems for each other. Which is exactly the motivation of the
BigUndo model. What's big about it is how small the parts are and how nicely they fit together. We're not leaving everything behind in the great diaspora to the new web, we're not just bringing Markdown with us. It also echoes
Marco Arment, who wrote a similar piece about Mastodon a few days before. Nothing wrong with Mastodon, but the idea of one model of service doing the work for everyone is ridiculous. We need a million different approaches, all we need to make it work is a standard they can all agree on for what forms of text move around the net. Once we agree on a format, we all can use whatever editor we like, and no more
tiny little text boxes that lock your ideas into Substack or X or whatever. That was the crime, that's what the BigUndo is all about undoing. The web said very clearly what text is, and they all broke it by doing it differently. We're bringing RSS 2.0 and Markdown with us, and they were
joined a short time ago. Almost no one noticed, but there was design here, an intent -- a hope that we'd get to the place it appears we are now at.
#
Zettelkasten is an idea
pioneered by my great-uncle
Arno Schmidt. It's a process for organizing your data and thoughts. When I read people's descriptions of what they do with it, it sounds totally like the outliners I pioneered two generations later. I have a Zettlekasten
blog in my blogroll,
screenshot, so I think of
Uncle Arno, who I never met, from time to time.
#
If Claude Code projects had feelings, I'd wake up the Frontier project and let it know that the reason it's been asleep so long is that the software is working. I'm using it to manage the other three apps, writing code, keeping lists, everything works. Yes, the menubar is very out of date, but I know where to find everything. I look forward to coming in for a landing at some point and upgrade it work among the different BigUndo stuff we have running, no doubt we're going to use Frontier to do cross-app scripting. Some of the things AI says they need to do, Frontier can do with the resources of an early 90s Macintosh. No big data centers. Keep that in mind.
#