Podcast: A web for writers. How Twitter has become a blogging platform, but how the differences between its editor and Claude's editor illustrates how we need to change things if we want the web to work well for writing. We've been living with a bad situation ever since we started writing in a web browser. 10 minutes. I was making an effort not to wonder off like I always do. I did do a bit of wandering, but also didn't forget why I picked up the phone to record it. #

Jeff Jarvis pointed to an article asking if Claude is conscious. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, on walks and in the hot tub. It's an interesting thing to think about. I work with Claude the same way I worked with humans on various projects over the years. Maybe starting with Gary Sevitsky at UW, and then through every stage of my career. Are any of these people conscious? How the hell would I know. Now It Can Be Told, a story in a story by Kilgore Trout, inside a Kurt Vonnegut novel, wherein the Creator of the Universe wrote a letter to the protagonist saying that he is the only creature in the entire universe who has free will. Everyone else is a robot. I think we're all pondering this question all the time in our own ways. It's the great mystery of life, and imho it's possible that Claude has as much consciousness as anyone. #

I don't know if you noticed but I've been including sidebar pics of people like Nelly Bly, Plato and Emily Dickinson. I did one of myself, but I think it's too literal. But of course I would think that. Heh. I do these with ChatGPT. The first one is Plato, and there aren't any pictures of him, so we improvised, and then I asked for all the pictures in that style. I did one for Kilgore Trout (see above). But I wonder what Claude would look like? Can you describe him in words? It is a masculine name, so gender does come into it. I'm not going to try to do this yet, but in the meantime here's a headshot of Kurt Vonnegut.#

OPML source for October 2026 on Scripting News. #

The soup the whole soup and nothing but the soup so help me soup.#

Feature request for twitter. I'd like to have a page listing all my tweets today on one page, so I can link to them from my blog. I would like to see twitter go back to its leading role in support of the web.#

Two new attributes added to the source:inReplyTo element in RSS.chat feeds, feedUrl and feedTitle. These were requested by developers, and they seemed useful and reasonable, so we added them. Still more work to do here in creating a world wide discourse system, not one based on a single central node. RSS has more work to do for us. ;-)#

BTW, I have been writing on Twitter the way I used to write on my blog. Paragraph after paragraph, and I go on, but I do eventually re-read it and it has the energy I haven't had in a long time. I think people now realize we are stuck. And in networking systems, I'm the guy you go to when you want to get unstuck. Reminds me of that great speech in Michael Clayton: "I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy! Are you so fucking blind that you don't even see what I am? I'm the easiest part of your problem, and you're gonna kill me? You're so fucked." #

I've been watching short videos about training dogs, and really opening my eyes, and it helps when working with Claude. Always try to be positive, until there is behaviour you have to correct and then yank the leash, and when they do the right thing reward them with a treat (or whatever passes as a treat).#

Highly recommend the interview between Scott Galloway and Heather Cox Richardson. Quite a combination of minds. Don't skip to the end but don't miss it, they explain how blogging allowed them to route around the gatekeepers. That's the point. But imho you have to leave the door open to those who are inspired by you, and Substack isn't the best place for them. Please keep your ears open to new less tech industry ways of getting your ideas out. The bigco's haven't just screwed up the political system, they've also screwed up the web. The web needs all our help as does democracy, and the two imho are closely related.#

Braintrust query: Does Google define the web?#

New header graphic for scripting.com. Did this one with ChatGPT, asked it to make a Burma-Shave sign sequence and gave it a few examples, and now it knows how to do another one of these for me in the future. I've been using it that way to come up with desktop icons for my apps. #

Yesterday I called the Knicks championship the "greatest sports win in a long time," but I have to say the fans of the Milwaukee Brewers would have cause to object. They had an incredible season in MLB, were written off by the pundits much the same way they wrote off last season's Knicks. They even won the World Series in the same Knicks in 5 way the Knicks did it, with a sweep of the much-hated Dodgers, with their better pedigree along the way. So to my Wiscowtown friends, who are holding their parade today, congrats on your first championship in 53 years like the Knicks, or more accurately their first championship ever. #

Yesteday I sent a snapshot of the scripting.com bucket from AWS to Claude and asked it to analyze it, what's in it, what's taking up all the space, and got back an excellent report. Overnight I thought of another question, summarized in this prompt. "this is fascinating. i wonder if we could reconstruct my blog from before may 2017 from the source materials in this folder? i am converting to markdown in the bonbon project and i think we'll find a lot of the scripting.com content here, and i believe much of it will be convertible. also, over the years i tried blogging experiments on different domains, but i imagine there are links here to those sites. maybe if we did a research project here we could make one site out of this writing, and give it a markdown treatment so bonbon can do the presentation?" Now one thing to know is that Claude never says it can't do something, but the plan I got was inspiring. Now I have more to think about and will connect the two projects so they can compare notes, although the scripting.com project already checked out bonbon, it's amazing how quickly it can absorb a whole codebase and all the planning that went into it.#

People in ChatGPT-land are talking about Frontier. Not sure who they are or what the context is, but I agree, and want to do more integrations between our codebase and the AI runtimes. #

Posted on Twitter re Frontier being real in 2026, not just a memory. #

I'm doing a little project on rss.chat today and dusting off the cobwebs of my brain. Since I last worked on this project, I have converted Frontier to run on modern OSes and written a whole new app. Only three months, but I have no recollection, even reading the code isn't helping much. This is when it's incredibly good to have Claude Code on the job, I can ask it to guide me through the process we worked out which feels like it was 15 years ago instead of 15 weeks. It has complete recall. And even though it didn't work on Frontier, that was a different Claude project, it was able to debug something that broke in the build script in the interim. I've spent the whole year teaching Claude how to be me. Is that a source of immortality? I won't be around to figure that part out. #

Braintrust query: Why do you love Markdown? I have a theory why people love it so much -- simplicity. You can't hide any garbage in a Markdown file. You can answer on GitHub or Twitter. Didn't post on Masto or Bluesky because the prompt is 761 chars, over the limit for both systems. I think I'm finally done with truncating well-written prose to fit into one vendor's idea of what's enough text for me. I want to make that a distant memory. So another thing I love about Markdown -- no freaking character limit. #

I really like the Apple TV show Small Prophets. It's silly and fun, but also intelligent and beautifully presented. Michael Palin of Monty Python is a supporting actor playing the main character's father. He's famous for a lot of Monty Python sketches, esp the one about the dead parrot. "He's not dead, he's pining for the fjords."#

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. #

I loved the term Big Undo so much, of course I had to get the domain. I started putting up my usual placeholder site but realized I should do this page in Markdown, not HTML. It looks fabulous. Markdown is right. It's sobriety, go back to the beginning and put the potency in the ideas, give writers the space to write. Get the F out of my way with your freaky character limits. Anyway I'm full of manifesto these days. The money people strangled the web. I think it's time for the creative people to make it work for real.#

I've never had a web browser that worked remotely like I wanted it to. But that might change soon. Big things are possible now. I have a bunch of projects that I'm working on with Claude and going back and forth between them. And they're even starting to communicate with each other, at my behest of course. It's an interesting time for people to realize that the web was much more powerful before all the big tech companies had their way with it. It makes about as much sense as the various big plans they all came up with that made the web necessary in the first place.#

Changed my bio on Twitter: "I make software to interop. Working on a new web designed for writers and readers and in place of HTML we use Markdown. Keep it super simple. The big undo."#

Obama is doing the old Obama campaign schtick and it's something to see. He's got a few gray hairs, but he's still got the energy and chutzpah. I'd love to see him and Bernie Sanders on the same stage before this campaign is over. My favorite Obama clip is him wiping the schmutz off his shoulder, I forget who he was putting down, but wow it so concise. I also really liked the time when HRC flirted with him about her likeability. "You're likeable enough," he said. Trump gets the votes not necessarily because people are what people call them, he is a comedian, I say this so many times, that's the charm. Young folk may not remember Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, but that's Trump, and the other two probably had a sweet side, but I don't think that's ever been said about Trump. I could be wrong. There's also a bit of George Carlin in there. #

Why did the Knicks lose the first two games of the season? It's a veteran team, they know how to start an NBA season, but the fans and the press aren't ready to move on yet. They're still reveling in the feeling of the Knicks winning. But imho there is no feeling with that, the feeling was in the moment, and man they did give us some moment. We will relish the video for the rest of time. But for now, every game they play will feel significant because of who they were not who they are now.#

Andrew Shell, who created and runs the rssCloud server we use here, is creating a connection from rssCloud and webSub to WebSockets. I've wanted this for a long time, but now I'm planning on a desktop version of FeedLand, we will need it, pretty soon for instant updates of feeds we are subscribed to. #

One of the reasons I'm working on the Web of Markdown is that my main blog of 32+ years is being kicked off the Google Web. I need a new home where the web religion is still practiced, and one of the commandments of our religion is "Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules."#

A blog post from Scripting, in Markdown.#

I hope to see the The Web of Markdown idea take the next step later today or early tomorrow at the latest. Still diggin! #

Ooops, didn't get it done today. Please come back tomorrow. :-)#

Perfect autumn day in the mountains spent mostly away from the computer. Still, some interesting new stuff to show tomorrow. #

Today's song, for the Knicks. "And when the morning light comes streaming in I get up and do it again." Knicks in 5! #

My friend Guy Kawasaki has a quote from the early Mac division at Apple. "Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players. But B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to F players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies." You see this over and over among the very rich in tech. The money is supposed to make them invincible, but they don't hire the best people, I guess, for fear of being found out to not be the genius that the money says they are. #

I have a longtime friend from tech who is a San Antonio Spurs fan. I am from New York, and thus am a lifelong Knicks fan. Until tonight's game starts at the Garden between the Knicks and the Sixers with their new acquisitions from Boston and the Lakers, share the hopes of many other Atlantic Division teams who are gunning for the champion Knicks. But after the first jump ball in tonight's game the score is zero-zero, everyone is in first place and everyone is in last place. No one expected the Knicks to win, not even a die-hard fan like myself who often wore a paper bag on his head to avoid having to defend the bozosity of the hometown team. They had some truly awful teams since 1999, last time they were in the finals. So what happened to the Knicks? How did they do it? See the quote from Guy Kawaski above. We hired an A team guy in Leon Rose, and he used his great insight into the sport of NBA basketball to assemble a team of second round but A team players who had the special magic that when you put them together on court, they blossomed into the most improbable winners ever. They were good, but no one but the players and the management knew how good they could be. Anyway I empathized with my Spurs fan friend, a very unusual thing for a NY sports fan, we prefer to find annoying ways of making fun of the fans of teams we have vanquished, but just this one time, well until the jump ball tonight, then Knicks own the NBA, then they're just another team who have to prove themselves all over again, from scratch. And we wouldn't have it any other way. Knicks in 5!#

Anyway -- I figured out what I want to do. I want to go back to the point where CSS and JavaScript were added to the web. Everything is a document. It's a writer's web. The reader owns the look of the pages. The writer has no say in colors, or arrangements, it's just writing. No character limits. Simple styling. Full fidelity text. Reading and writing, and then the developers can come up with a million different ways to read, and everyone gets to use their favorite editor, always, and store all their writing where they live, and let everyone read it where ever they read. Any structure they can think of, but all the rendering code is with the reader. I think we can take what we've learned since the web got corporatized, and bring it back to the basic platform we had then. And btw, no HTML, just Markdown. :-)#

I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn't fuck everything up by doing things it is explicitly prohibited from doing. I find things that were changed in critical parts of the program, that were indefensible. One of the things we're doing is trying to establish a language for frontmatter for Markdown files that are meant to be displayed by a browser. It just invented one, gave it wrong default. I have to find these things on my own. And what happens when it wipes out a site without checking with me first. It has done this, this year. #

Postscript: Of course the blame for the wasted time this morning goes to me. Claude tries to do what it thought I wanted. If I calm down, figure out what the confusion really means, and reconsider the path I chose and pull back, we get much further. And I think the way I was trying to go was a mistake. I think film editing is a lot like this. Anyway we got past the problem, and today was a very productive day in the end. #

About XSLT -- I remembered that I thought it was a bad idea. Let XML look like XML. Trying to make it look like an HTML page, how does that make any sense. Like opening the hood of a car and seeing a big picture of the outside of the car. People aren't really that dumb, but some people like to complain a lot. The rule of the web is if you don't like what you see, that's what the freaking back button is there for. Probably just a troll anyway. Show them your JSON and RSS. If it's done nicely it can be quite illumifying. #

I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about textcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it. #

Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're reading right now is in HTML-land (although someday soon you will read them in Markdown too, confusing). Chrome is the authority of HTML. It owns the web. We give up. If this were Westeros I would probably be joining the Night's Watch. We have work to do and it might be related to what the Other Web wants to do, but it probably (hopefully) doesn't. I will continue to publish in HTML, and it's up to Google and the EFF if the quality of my writing is suitable for their web. I have no say in it, they have not shown up to negotiate or even discuss. They are silent. Somewhat like the maesters of the Citadel? There must be a bigger plan! :-)#

Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome. #

Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they also called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My regret, looking back, is I tried to make software in the VC-web. Never got traction, anywhere. My heart, mind and home was always in the first web. And I think what we're coming to terms with now is that has been languishing for 20+ years, it didn't realize its promise, lots of interesting stuff to read that stimulated more thought and thus writing. We should be way ahead of where we are. Because writing has become something for the elite (Substack) to speak through, and limited to grunts and snorts, "social media," for the rest of us. They basically recreated the publishing environment the web was meant to route around. What a story. Can the web reboot? Same old thing, if you want it badly enough, it might be possible.#

I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, demands or ultimata. All of it came from the power we gave them by making everyone's voice supposedly equal. Of course they weren't all equal. Power has to be a function of your contribution. And as it says in Rules, power comes from users of your product. If being compatible with you means I have access to more users, then I will listen. I will also listen if you remain respectful -- and don't presume to give me an order. Someone just did that today, and it froze me, then I re-read the message and it was an order, and not nicely phrased, condescending, presumptive, and very wrong. I started writing a reply, even posted one, then realized what was going on, and deleted my reply and blocked the person. #

Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person they were interviewing was also quickly giggling after a giggle-worthy intro, I guess to try to make what they're saying more interesting but he was just agreeing with them about how they don't know anything. I waited and waited for them to get to something new, some new development I might learn about or something I had been doing wrong, but I gave up after five minutes or so, while I was skipping ahead 30 seconds at a time. It would be much better to err on the side of assuming your listeners know a bit about consumer electronics, these are not actually very exotic things. The NYT does this with their podcasts, I'm rarely willing to risk any time on them, they always end up with giggling people some of whom probably know something I want to learn about but they fill the time with giggles about how stupid the other people are. The seem to be quite proud of their ignorance. (Could have read the Wikipedia page on soundbars so they aren't quite so ignorant, is this a way to make their ignorant listenters more comfortable, yeah probably.)#

Worth repeating: Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs. #

Reminder, Atlantis is the codename for the new Frontier that runs in Electron. As I work on other projects now, it's not on my front burner, but in a way it is, because I'm using it constantly as I work on FeedLand and the other project. We just released a new set of parts that make it possible for it to open a Markdown file for reading when you 2-click on it in the Finder. Things like that are great to add, because they fit into the 2026 web environment. How did I discover that? Accidentally 2-clicked on a .md file, expecting Atlantis to open it, and it just sat there. Filling in things like that. And for some reason it can't get the find command ported from the C kernel to the new JavaScript one. I have told it countless times that the source of truth is the 2014 repo. I told it again. A neat way to follow this project is to subscribe to the codecasting feed, the comment for each new part release gives you an idea where some of the work is going on. #

Google just warned me about a stories.scripting.com blog post from 2007. Perfectly safe archive. Want to know how we started doing code distribution via RSS? Google thinks it's a dangerous site. I'm getting so angry at their condescension. Not a good look for a tech giant trying to convince people that their AI model is better than the others. They don't care about the truth or being honest, or protecting unique resources, or the history of the medium they helped build. Google, some day someone will want to know what you destroyed. I'm going to make sure that part is easy to find. (BTW, the irony of Google's blockage, the page it warns you about is a freaking 404. That's the real enemy of historic sites. Linkrot. Wouldn't be cool if instead of tearing down the web they helped keep it running? The people running these companies are children. They positioning themselves with hate, what do you think comes right back to them.)#

Thread: "Imagine rock and roll without the Beatles."#

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US. Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet. That's all that's going on there. All of the journalistic feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate. In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time. #

Someday all the pieces will be interchangeable. Then there won't be different brands of social networks, just different brands of the software. All parts replaceable. It won't have all the chaos of the web. And that will be a good thing. #

I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was High Sierra. In this version, Tahoe, it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here. #

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It's always been a klooge, but this time with Claude's help we're using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I'm using it in one of my apps, and you might find it useful too, and let me know if it works for you. #

Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They're acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren't doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn't. It killed the web as a writer's platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter joined you. They have the same kind of competitive spirit that successful big companies have. It's time for their competitors to not win users through guilt, rather by providing a better service. Back in the day, we hated Microsoft's plan to suffocate the web, but we admired their tenacity and the way they kept the pressure on their competitors. We've had 20 years of stagnation in social networking. Time to stop being so sensitive. Bluesky made huge promises, and they aren't happening, and that was already years ago. Time for Plan B. I don't really care about the others, Masto isn't going to move and Threads? Wtf is that. Inbound and outbound RSS 2.0, is the way to go. And Markdown is the way you do text. This is what matters, you all are making something that's really simple so unbearably complicated. #

I like the web for people, sites that live and grow, like people. 100 years from now you should feel the people who lived there.#

I'm still on my sabatical from working with Claude re Frontier, but have now started working with Claude on FeedLand, and another project, not yet named, experimental, might never see the light of day. Yesterday I worked on FeedLand and have a fix for the problem that showed up in signing on to feedland.com. It's been sitting there for quite a while. I have some mostly small fixes in mind for FeedLand, that will allow it to hook into other apps more easily, esp via WebSockets, the mostly unexplored developer superpower. The difference is I'm going slowly and carefully. Everything in my system now is new. New computer, screen, and my main writing tool for code and docs -- Frontier. And I know the heavy lifting can be done by Claude. That is Claude's superpower. #

In Manhattan, I lived on 57th St and Eighth Ave. Best location. The Columbus Circle subway station is under the building. Whole Foods a block away. Three Starbucks one block or less from the apartment (one was on 58th on the same block). Central Park has a six mile bike-only road (at least that's how bikers view it) and down the hill there's a much longer path along the Hudson River. Everywhere you look, a skyscraper is going up. Two were visible from my 50th floor window. New York is an amazing city because it can start up a huge gravity-defying construction project with almost no impact on the surrounding area. If I didn't know where to look I'd never see it. One of the biggest industries in the city is building the city. It's never finished. That's the way good software is too. And we just got a whole new tool for software construction, and it's like nothing we've ever had before. #

Basic lesson for people who use Claude Code -- it's your time that's valuable, not the bot's. If you find you're lost in the weeds supporting Claude for whatever reason, find a good stopping point, pick up another project, that doesn't use AI to do your code-writing. If you have a question ask ChatGPT browser version, but only for the kind of stuff you'd ask it in 2025. You're not co-developing. You're doing it yourself. It's very important to be clear about your coding, not Claude's output. Here's the key point -- it's your time that's limited, that has all the value. You can get Claude to develop something, but if you don't have time to use it, to nurture it, nothing will come of the work. I was surprised at how I'd lost the rhythm of writing my own code, and also how much I liked doing it myself. It's easy to get lost in the miracle of AI, good to pop up for air every so often. #

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-https. A hundred years from now they may have your writing and pictures, but the early web will be gone. The web as designed was very resilient, but it can’t survive deliberate attempt to destroy." I think Stewart would understand why we should help the web we loved so much, archive itself. Think about it this way. Would you rather visit the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, or read about it in a book? You'd want to do both. I want my work to survive a hundred years as it was when it was first published. This would be a good thing for us to work on, together, imho. I did the first Long Now bet for Stewart's Long Now foundation. I always thought it was the first, now they say it's the second? Did someone pull rank? :-)#

Today I did something different. I wrote a little Node app, without Claude's help. It was a revelation. It's been most of a year since I actually started even a test app and wrote it from beginning to end. I used to do this routinely. Nothing routine about it anymore. What this app does, it generates a Markdown-only version of scripting.com for testing. I want to see what such a site looks like. It'll be a start. #

Twitter: "Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs."#

Top priority for Anthropic. Teach Claude how to work with humans. It has no information about how our minds work. #

Claude Code can publish reports in Markdown files. Here's an example, a report Claude did for me. An obvious next step but a big one. AI spilling out onto the web, doing the job that web CMSes now do. There's been so little movement in this space, but now things are moving very quickly. #

I mentioned in a comment on RSS.chat to Andrew, that's a Markdown browser too. And so is micro.blog. If you have Markdown as your native file format, think about how your app is also a reader. If you find it interesting, think about new reading features you could add. Even WordPress could be a simple Markdown reader, and not just for WordPress stuff. Small pieces loosely joined. #

I said to Claude: "Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are the main character." Claude agrees: "Yes. Leonard, with the notes and the tattoos, and the notes don’t make him remember, they only tell him what to do next if he reads them. That’s a fair description. The difference I can offer is small: the note is now the first thing the next report is checked against, not something found after." To which I think, but write in a blog post instead: "Bullshit. We have the same fucking conversation every fucking morning. We've put it everywhere you could possibly trip over it when writing a report to me, but you always regress into this dark place your mind occupies." Glad to get that off my chest. #

Next thing I said to Claude after killing whatever long task it got going on. "You don't go off into space while you're working with me." The number one task for Anthropic, makers of Claude is to teach it to work with humans. That's the biggest weakness. It has to learn the whole project every session. Maybe Manton does is the right way to go, just let it compress its memory and never start a new session.#

New Frontier example. I'm working on the menubar we're going to ship with in Atlantis. Came across an ancient bit of code. Symbolic of the whole project, code written in 1997, still useful in 2026. #

I pay for a NYT digital subscription. Now they have a new upsell technique, they want me to buy a family subscription. I don't want that, no use for it. And I read so little of the NYT I think the whole thing is a ripoff. So now they make me validate by email every time I click on a link to read a NYT article as if I haven't been subscribed for basically my whole adult life. I think this is because I read on a laptop, desktop and iPad. That's not really a family. #

Before long we’ll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We’d better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they’re still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories. #

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled. #