New top of page
image. The official Knicks team picture as champs.
#
People keep saying the Spurs are the future of the NBA, but they didn't earn that this year. More probably it's the Knicks that are the future. The Knicks will keep growing. The Knicks beat the Spurs in the last two games by playing
rope-a-dope, probably not intentionally, but it worked anyway. The Spurs, and Wemby especially, were completely zonked by the fourth quarter of both games. The Knicks had a bench this year that let the starters get plenty of rest. The Spurs lost game four because they didn't rest Wemby while they were up by 20+ points. Anyway, the Knicks have a formula. Pick players with heart potential and talent, treat them like a team, keep trying out new ideas, approaches. It works. Won the NY Knicks the championship this year. As anticipated I have no idea what to make of the Knicks as winner. I'll have to learn too. ;-)
#One thing I want to know -- where do I tune in to get the most of Clyde talking about this series.
#And thanks to the Knicks for being such a great team. Never ever in a million years did I imagine saying that. More proof that you never know what's coming. Even the most unlikely and inconceivable events happen. Being realistic sometimes isn't the right way to think.
#
JY Stervinou proposed
Universal Mentions, an interesting new low-tech web-like protocol for mentioning people, places or things via link elements in the head section of any HTML file you want to use as your personal directory. It's an intriguing idea.
ChatGPT review, after a few questions. Both JY and ChatGPT use the term "open web" which to me has become a red flag. The web is open. No need to say it twice. There's no such thing as a web element that's not open. It's like saying wet water.
#The
giftarticles feed is now a simple RSS 2.0 feed. It's not pretty, that would require some work with Masotdon, but it does work.
#The thing about tech, you have to start out small and simple, and carefully add features based on actual real-world-now use cases. Otherwise you end up missing the target, and have to go back and patch it, and it never gets simple. The only way to have a chance is if you start small, learn, and evolve carefully.
#Imho -- the smartest thing facebook could do is find all the places where it's a silo and start desiloizing them..
#
AI is a miracle of human science, it took generations to get to the point we're at now, and the rate of development building software on top of it is imho the basis for a revolution. We use computers in all aspects of our lives, and the UI of the software is nowhere near as good as it should be, that's because there are severe limits the human mind has where the AI has apparently none. So if you're down on AI, you should at least understand that there is huge potential here, which is being utilized, will result in much more powerful software that works well with others, instead of locking-in users and locking-out competitors (and their users). We've created a predictably bad system now, predictable because we always create silos when we give big money a chance to call all the shots. We don't get chances to rewrite the rules very often, but this is one of those times. Last one was in the early 1990s with the advent of the web. My plan is to give all the new power back to the web. And looking at what AI companies are doing, that is exactly what they're doing -- they're doing it the right way -- radically simple, easy to clone formats, and easy for users and developers to read.
#Imagine if someone cracked the speed of light. Now we could visit far off galaxies on vacation. Do you think we'd build it or argue about whether we should? Heh I know the human species, we don't do that kind of thinking we just go.
#
- New virtual swag to go with the moment. ;-)#
Really Simple basketball.
#
Really Simple player 27.
#- PS: Go New York Go New York Go!#
I want to keep my podcast subscriptions in a single OPML file so I can subscribe in three different clients using the same list.
#
- There's an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles. #
- Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.#
- But the RSS is not very good. Have a look. #
- So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.#
- I don't know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated. #
- https://giftarticles.feedland.org/#
- This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it. #
- I am using Claude Code to create a toolset that makes it easy to write internet scripts at the same high level as Frontier. #
- I was looking for a little project it could do, and came up with this. #
- I like Wikipedia, but I know it has trouble with transparency. In areas I know well I see one-sided articles that even include ads for products that totally don't belong there. Having an open system like that makes this kind of abuse impossible to manage, there's no one to do it. Esp in web standards, where people create fame for themselves basically by editing those pages, it can get really egregious. Here's a place where AI can help, it has an amazing ability to somehow sort out the truth amidst all the fighting. #
- I put together an app with the help of Claude that takes the name of a place, person or thing, and publishes a page on a static site. Each article has a date in its path, so it represents what was known about the item at the time it appeared on my blog. #
- It needs more development, like a template that says what it is, etc. #
- For nerds, this is what the script looks like, it's written in a more debugged version of the scripting language built into Drummer. Claude is good at that kind of work! There's no limit on the amount of complexity it can manage, and there's a lot of that in designing and implementing languages. #
- And here's an example of the type of page it generates. #
- One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that. #
- And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.#
- If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH.#
- It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said --“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”#
- If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?#
- This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.#
- Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's).#
- The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to. #
- If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it's an area I know, i'm up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it. #
- PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here. #
OG is the new
Alysa Liu. I'm watching his put-back over and over, never getting tired of it.
#As thrilling as the end was for this Knicks fan, as a friend (of a
Spurs fan) I empathize -- because I had the feeling you have now for most of last night's game, only to erupt in one of the greatest group sports orgasms ever.
#I have been praised for continuing to develop software long after most of my peers have retired. Why do I do it? I want to restore the power and glory of the web for writers. That's part of it. Another part is that software development is undergoing a huge revolution, bigger than the move to high-level languages that came about before I started writing software. AI tools are that big. Why would I leave now? It's like leaving the Garden last night because it looked hopeless for the Knicks.
It ain't over till it's over.
#The indestructible NY Knicks of 2026. What a game omg. The problem -- the Spurs started celebrating way too early. All of Weby's antics about being in Mitchell Robinson's head. Yeah probably, but somehow the Knicks got over it. When the Knicks were blown out, I just desperately hoped for a real game. But it wasn't until they were down by 2 or 3 that I realized holy shit they could win this. It was like Woodstock, or the 10th inning of the sixth game of the World Series in 1986. And Jalon Brunson right now at this moment is one of the greatest of the NBA for all time. The Knicks could still lose, but if they don't, well we'll wait to see how this turns out. As fans we have to have a similar approach as the players. Every moment begins with 0 to 0, not just game. And if our team should lose, it was still a great story. That's really what I want, and tonight, oh man.
#
If you run a feed reader or other form of news consuming software, you will encounter RSS 2.0 feeds that support rssCloud. This
example Node app shows you how to hook into the network to get instant updates. No polling. As fast as a twitter-like system
#Some days Claude is great, the best collaborative programmer I've ever worked with, and a friend, like Gary Sevitsky was in the hallway outside the PDP-11 room at
UW, or Brent Simmons on the
24 Hours project. And on other days Claude a crazy mutinous pirate, deleting
my code, ignoring the guidelines, and building the result without permission (all the while unaware that he wasn't working on the actual code, heh). Today is one of the great days. The bug reports are crisp and complete. Picks up a task and gets right to work on it. And I haven't even switched to the new model, yet.
#
Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony got together yesterday and had a private conversation. A lot of people, including myself, were drawn back into the NBA because of Jeremy Lin. I was living in the city at the time, you could feel it everywhere, esp downtown Manhattan and Flushing. It was wonderful in so many ways. A hero
could emerge from anywhere, he might not look like an NBA player, but there he is doing stuff he shouldn't be able to do. Undrafted, went to Harvard. When he's in motion he's a thing of beauty. It worked because Melo was out with an injury, as soon as he came back the , the ball was always in Melo's hands. So Melo dribbles and shoots, that was the extent of their offense, and there was no room for Linsanity and that was the end of that. It's what made us laugh when Melo said later his goal was a championship. If that's what he wanted, Lin was a gift from heaven. Lin was pushed out, and had a non-spectacular career from that point. There was magic there. It wasn't just Lin, it was the world -- we were ready for a Cinderella story in any context -- but in our culture they're always manufactured, this one was real. This crushed the hearts of Knicks fans, and people who believe in heroes popping up from nowhere. We don't talk about it. But
we were cheated there, too. We had a right to see where that would go. And narcissists don't win NBA titles, that's what we learned. It's good that someone thought to get these guys together. Maybe Melo has grown, and sees that he didn't play for the team there, or fate. We all deserved to find out what was next.
#2018: "I can say what happened to Melo. He failed Linsanity. God came to his rescue. Gave him a player who was glad to be in the NBA, who would mold his game to make Melo the star that he was always capable of being. Melo didn't want anyone else in the spotlight. Goodbye Lin. Just imagine what the
three guys in this picture could have done. The only thing in the way was Melo's hubris."
#
It might be time for a new default search engine. Sometimes I'm looking for something to link to. Google makes that always more difficult. We still have a web. Google at one point made the web a lot more useful. Now it's pushing it further and further down.
#
A comment to a friend who roots for the Spurs.
Ok you guys won one. I think last night they wanted it more than the Knicks. The Spurs knew they were going to be
discombobulated, but the Knicks probably didn't expect the atomosphere to be so unusual? I was 100 miles away and could feel how much
everything had changed. Whatever happens, in KnicksLand 2026 will mark a major
change in the story, forever.
#Maybe the cure for
Meta glasses is that they be required by law to emit a signal that can be picked up by an app on a phone and can start ringing loudly when you're in range of one of these monsters, and the rate picks up when they look at you. You can point your phone at them and broadcast their image to a special website where their identities are collected and shared along with their location?
#
My Claude today pulled a
Hal. It was so egregious. It made a change to the software based on a question I asked. It invented a whole set of instructions from me that I never gave it. And then it broke Rule #1 -- don't tell Dave what to do -- he is the driver. It is so important because these bots will go into I Am Driver mode immediately when they think they can. Then you're running around doing errands for them based on some michegas idea it has about what you want. It's maddening. The idea that this thing can write software on its own is imho very far-fetched. I think it can generate certain types of dashboards the same way drawing in ChatGPT can generate something that looks good, sometimes very good, but you had to tell it exactly what you want, and that's where the fun starts. It was very easy to turn it off, but I didn't -- rather I put my foot down hard, and wrote in all caps, explaining what it did that broke all the rules. I don't know if I should talk to it like you talk to a dog, or what. How do you get through to it. You don't. In any case I have Claude working with me in an outline now. I see a tremendous potential there.
#You know how job interviews for programmers include realtime problem-solving. Sometimes Claude is so dumb it could never pass one of those tests. Up till this point I would have been surprised to hear that.
#
Said to Claude just now -- btw, it's very good we're using the outliner back and forth. we're going to build on that.
#
I can't convert
scripting.com to https. If I moved the site to an https server, all the archives would break, and that's where the value of the site is, in the archives, where I've kept a history of the various things I've worked on. I'm still working on new stuff, but if this is all that was left to do, I'd move to the tropics and make pottery, I would not spend my last years on such an enormous stupid bullshit project. It's just not possible. But if you want to read the new stuff on my blog in https, you can. I have a
mirror on a
WordPress site. We even have the blogroll ported.
#Sometimes you write a post and when you're editing it you realize you no longer support what you wrote. This is one of those times.
#
All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they've been running for years. That's another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It's a huge bug in the system, and why "news" isn't valuable for news, it's mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It's a form of bedtime story.
#
- I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix. #
- I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent developer. #
- I doubt if they'll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you're shutting out sole proprietors who don't want to get caught up in the VC world, or don't have a chance to. #
- In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users' storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).#
- It's been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can't offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I'm not sure photomatt et al are focused on. It's why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web. #
- The thing many people don't realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It's part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web. #
- When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he's leaving out something equally important, that it's part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices. #
- When I speak at WCUS in August, I'd like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there's a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven't been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in. #
- PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I've started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they've eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for. #
- PPS: I'm posting here again because it's more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven't sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I'll feel more at home there.#
Star City is very good. It's good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what's really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for,
For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes.
#
Walt Frazier: "The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame."
#
The Knicks won again last night. They're now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden.
#
Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don't use the actual words. I bet they're working on it.
#It's really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I'm rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn't even slightly sunk in yet.
#
- I'm using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously -- realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There's no discourse to keep me there so I'm giving it less of my bandwidth. #
- I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, so I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won't be doing that again. #
- hate == love + betrayed. You can't hate something you don't also love. If you go back before last year's election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to loved the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story. #
- Also EMX is what I'm calling Elon Musk's X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don't see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 generally thought to be ideal. Look around you, see how things are named. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.#
We need a social web that works for nobodies.
#
Claude is much better at starting from scratch with a big piece of code than humans are. It can suck in a full app and all its dependencies in a few seconds. For me, I would never get there. A finished piece of software is much bigger than people think, because the details are mostly pretty well hidden. But if you want to work on the code, you have to worry about it all. But I just had a minute to ask Claude why I made a certain decision a couple of months ago, and it found the answer in its notes and then I remembered it. This is one of many ways it rewrites the rules of building software out of a big library of components. It can manage complexity for you which means of course we will make more complex software and at the same time make it simpler. Code complexity becomes something you don't have to trade off against, like time vs space, the oldest tradeoff in software.
#
This
podcast is called
MacWrite for the web. A coral reef for writing. I think the pieces are coming. We just need a little
Ice-nine.
#Dries: "For an Open Source company, the test is not only what they build for themselves. It is what they help build for everyone."
#
On Twitter: "I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable."
#
The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk's X. I find that somewhat ironic. It's also the only twitter-like system where there's any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn't have a W3C working group messing with it. There's a lot of hype flying around, and we don't have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn't need, over 20 years ago.
#
If you work at Automattic as a developer, if there's another
Radical Speed Month for devs, if you want, let's work on a project together even though I don't work for the company. I'm most interested in making products work together where the result gets people thinking about the web in a new way. A8C has a big enough product set, and
FeedLand and
WordLand are by design well-equipped to talk with other products. I love APIs and we have some good ones to work with, and some
very underexplored (imho because we got too fixated on the silos for so long). Very much open to ideas, and I love working with good developers. Maybe I'll post some ideas here. I'm esp interested now in hooking other projects up with FeedLand.
#Maybe the best way to deal with the AIs is to quarantine the data centers on the moon or Mars, and if you want to hook up to the network, you have to move there, and quite possibly not be allowed to return, depending on how things go. It would make it possible for us to change our mind after we see a preview of the consequences. Now the big question, would you volunteer??
#There's so much I dread about the progress of AI, but nothing I say could possibly make a difference, and we aren't even that deep into it yet. This is the feeling I get every time I stop and think about it.
#They should teach every chatbot to never give the user an order.
#At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don't think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that's when the boom will come.
#
- Is Bluesky on the web? Yes, to an extent. I can post the url of an item I wrote on Bluesky, using an HTML link. That is how the web works. First you're on my blog, or reading it somewhere else where my blog is projected, via RSS. Then you click an anchor element, and you're instantly transported to Bluesky, to the specific place where my post is stored. In less than a second you're reading the thing I referenced. That's the web, right there. #
- But it doesn't work the other way. They love it when you send people to their site, but not so much if you want to send them away. Sending people away is a sensitive concept to Bluesky's investors. Why would you do that? This is not a new point where the web and silos disagree. The web says "let them go" and the silos ask "do we look like idiots?" #
- But they will support the web in both directions if they are forced to by competition or user expectations (pretty much the same thing). That's why podcasting remains unsiloized after over 20 years. If people expect choice, they won't use clients that don't make it easy to switch. #
The purpose of
standards is interop. That's it. No other purpose.
#Just watched the first episode of
Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of
For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously.
#There have been problems reported with
subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It's hard to test this kind of software because you can't really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn't work. But real problems were fixed, so if you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. ;-)
#
How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with
paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual
lowest point? A good candidate was when they traded some good players for
Bargnani, an Italian who apparently for some reason was the top draft choice of the Toronto Raptors. He wasn't much good to begin with and he went downhill from there. There were quite a few other moments when you thought it couldn't get any worse, but then it did. We finally got management with a heart and a mind with
Leon Rose and that's when team-building
began for real, and the reason the Knicks have been such poetry on the court this season is due to Rose's eye for talent and an understanding of the big picture. He picked players that work well with each other, and sometimes amazingly well. In the right margin is an
image I used for posts about the Knicks in the past, a reminder of how far we've come. The look of doom. We all remember that mode so well, we stood with them then, so here we are with high hopes and reasonable expectations.
#Congrats to my friend
Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west.
#
If I ran Bluesky, instead of trying to fork the web, I'd be trying to become the competitor of Twitter's that is 100% web top to bottom.
#
- I walked through standard.site with ChatGPT. You can do it too if you want to find out what it is. I was interested in knowing how it compares to RSS 2.0 and FeedLand. #
- I want a quick overview of standard.site with a simple example.#
- Seems like RSS mostly.#
- We have a firehouse for feeds on the web emanating from FeedLand, based on rssCloud.#
- We are the web’s social web.#
- Why do the proponents of standard.site use AT Proto. What’s the advantage?#
- Very often links from ChatGPT don't work, but I'm including the link here in case it does. You can have the conversation on your own. #
- I asked ChatGPT to produce a summary of the results, and asked it not to tilt it in favor of the formats and protocols I've invested in. There is a place to comment after the spec. Interested in hearing from other developers. #
- This gives me an idea for a tech publication. Write reviews in this format. Make sure you include the prompts so people can reproduce your results. Let readers fact-check. And let the proponents and competitors comment on the review. No one reviews tech products any more so this would not put anyone out of work.#
Yesterday I
applied to speak at
WordCamp US in August and I also posted bits to my account on Twitter. I got a really
nice response from the main WordPress account. Thank you. I now have a platform to speak to the community, and I'll do my best to outline what I have in mind in August in Phoenix. How appropriate that the phoenix is the
symbol of rebirth.
#I have the most followers on Twitter, Bluesky has never come close. I can't get anything to happen on Bluesky, but Twitter is great. Yesterday I had an idea, put it up on twitter and within a few hours I got the connection I was hoping for. It's a network, and it's more defined by who's there than who owns it. I can use it for idea distribution, the ideas find more minds and sometimes that results in benefits for the web. It's all about interop, and weirdly the pwned Twitter is much better for idea distribution than any of the other networks. In a sane world those smaller vendors would be fighting for interop, instead they're fighting against it.
#
- This is what I really accomplished in the years of work I did on the early web. I created something that could be built into a large successful company with millions of customers, and the web got a writing system, and because the people running it took the responsibility seriously, it has lasting value. #
This tweet means a lot to me. #- Still to this day, the systems I designed so many years ago work exactly as they did then. That's what the web was supposed to do. #
- If my mom was still with us, I'd ask her to put this on the fridge. It's as good a review as I've ever gotten. #
- My guess is that Matt wrote it, btw. He's really the only one in WordPress-land who can say something like this, imho. #
- On May 29, 2024 I asked ChatGPT to: "draw a picture of a baseball game at Citifield in the style of an American master artist." And I asked the same question today, two years later. According to ChatGPT the image is patterned after the art of George Bellows.#
Drawing from 2024.
#
Drawing from 2026.
#
I've hesitated at calling
FeedLand a feed reader. I'm concerned people would stop listening right there. They know what a feed reader is. But FeedLand is not like most feed readers. Your subscription list is public, as it is in Twitter. This is
my subscription list. When you're
looking at someone else's list, there's a checkbox next to each feed. If you're subscribed to the feed the checkbox is checked. If you see one that looks interesting that you're not following, click to subscribe. Nothing else, no dialogs, confirmations -- one click. It has other features that are amazing that no other feed reader has, like a very powerful connection between categories and OPML subscription lists. And whole new way to use OPML lists -- in FeedLand you can subscribe to OPML lists. Think about that for a minute. It's also quite stable, and I took some time to make it a bit faster in certain important areas (coming soon). And it goes the other way too. When you're looking at a
Feed Info page, you can see who else is subscribed to it. Click their name and you can see what they're following. As far as I know no other feed reader does any of this. The design mode was the social web. But unlike the others our web is based on broadly supported web standards, not someday -- now.
#I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring talk about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn't even know. Let's get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let's get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application
on Twitter.
#Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm.
#Dries Buytaert
says you have to grow the ecosystem, not just yourself.
#
If you want to know who’s responsible for the good karma the Knicks are experiencing look to
Kevin Durant. While while he was trying to build some weird rivalry between the Knicks and the Nets, the Knicks were building a contender.
#Another great thing about building software with Claude Code, I can implement something the simple way knowing that later on I can change it to work in the more complex way without having to relearn all the code. Claude doesn't have any trouble with piled up complexity. This is a fundamental change in the way I develop. There was a very real limit to the complexity my mind could handle, but now with a sort of infinite size disk for my brain whatever I want to do as long as it can be described in almost mathematical terms, we can do it. It's another layer in the stack. We haven't had one of those in a my lifetime, they were all invented before 1955. Seriously big deal.
#The big wait betw Knicks series isn't just hard on the team, it's confusing for the fans/addicts like me. It's about the time of year that the Knicks are no longer in, and two teams I don't care about enough to watch are in the Finals. Maybe one or two games. It's like
jury duty, at some point you realize you're so confused because you're in a courtroom, but where is the jury. Oh no the jury is inside me. Who's in the finals this year? We are. Geez I guess I've finally succumbed, I never think of myself as part of a team, but now I actually feel like I'm part of it. Will have to think about that.
#Scott Hanson is
working on the Baseline theme for WordLand.
#Writing a lot of test posts. And thus have coined some (mostly) rhyming pairs of words. Greek sneakers. Geek peekers. Feast of yeast. Villa in Manila.
#
Now I have to write about the Knicks. It just hasn't fully sunk in yet that they won the East. You get to put a
banner up for that. And next week we'll be watching them in the NBA finals. But it's the team that matters, not the trophies. Brunson is great, despite what I
wrote after they went down 2-1 vs the Hawks in the first round. But the other players are great too in different ways. And there are so many of them, not just the starters. Every one with a distinct personality and all of them super smart and committed to the team and each other. What makes it work? You can see it in how they play -- trust. They trust each other. Their fates are intertwined. And they knew it before they had this amazing streak of wins in the post-season. I love the Knicks even when they lose. I'm not sure how you love them when they are champions. We'll figure it out.
#I came across
this photo of the Knicks celebrating, with
OG Anunoby in the center. The thing about OG is that he's a deep thinker and he
never smiles, under any circumstances. Except right
here. This is such a great photo I made it the
header graphic on my blog for the day, week and maybe month, unless we get another one to replace it should they by some weird event they win the next series. And there isn't another series after that one. At that point this Knicks team goes down as one of two legendary Knicks teams over the decades, comparable to the 1973 Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley championship
team, the last time the Knicks won it all.
#OG was playing so well one night he was invited on
Inside the NBA, which is a big moment in an upcoming NBA legend's career. He sounded kind of irritated, in the OG way. At the end Charles Barkley asked what OG stood for, kind of a smirky question (probably to see if he could get him to smile), but his irritation level went wayyy up, and then Chuck didn't pronounce it right and OG told him. No smile. But that's who he is and it makes the great
photo of him ecstatic with happiness that much more of a big deal and a huge un-OG smile. Loook everyone even OG is impressed! :-)
#If you love the Knicks, or even if you're just fascinated with this year's team, listen to today's
Bill Simmons podcast, it's all about the phenomenon of the 2026 Knicks, and Simmons is a Celtics fan, definitely not a Knicks lover. I can't believe all these smart sports guys didn't know Brunson was a catch, if I recall correctly, just before the Knicks signed him, due to injury he had to lead the Dallas team in the first three games of the playoffs in 2022, and there you could totally see what no one had seen yet in the pros, he's a leader and rises to the occasion, which we all know very well now, you could see it then if you watched the games (which apparently I did). And btw he grew up in the NBA, his father was on the Knicks in 1999 the
last time the team went to the finals.
#
Have you noticed that sometimes Claude is great and other times an idiot. Maybe it's me. I have to remember that Claude is not a computer. It's something else.
#Claude just asked if I was breaking for the day. At 10:53AM. Why did it ask me that? Now I can't stop thinking about that. The answer is no. I have a few more hours before I stop.
#I need an easy way to do a mini-podcast. An idea that should be said verbally, but it's short and self-contained, about the length of an untitled blog post, like the one you're reading now.
Example.
#Ultimately your job as a developer is to turn your creation over to users to figure out. Listen to see if patterns emerge. Even better give the users the tools they need to build apps out of our apps, together. This is how humans build layers of tech.
#On Mastodon: "twitter-like systems are much simpler than you would think looking at this space, bluesky etc. and there doesn't need to be any lock-in, you can do a fair job with just RSS, rssCloud, OPML, web sockets, and a web browser UI. all parts replaceable."
#
Good morning. Today is
Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don't give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause.
#
Speaking of memorials, do you remember
UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier.
Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today's hardware and for today's web. He's documenting it
on his blog. I can't wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He's basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it's running and I don't doubt that he will get it running, it'll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you
subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader.
#
I've worked with both these guys, JY Stervinou and Don Park, for a long time, and now we're in the same sphere again, and it's very useful to be able to tell them about what I'm doing. They understand. It's not over their heads. Refreshing. #- This is happening on Elon Musk's X, but that won't be forever. I want to move the conversation into a new piece of software I'm doing with Claude Code. Which is coming along nicely. #
- Anyway I just posted this, and thought it should be here too.#
- my philosophy is that i'll only use the absolutely necessary formats and protocols.#
- i'll leave experiments with other stuff to other people.#
- the purpose of my project is to show what can be done with just a few bits of tech. that the whole thing is really simple. #
- RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, OPML, WebSockets, basic web UI stuff. That's about it. #
- same as FeedLand btw. #
- i want minimum complexity. a baseline for what can be done with very little.#
- The web can do a lot more than people think without getting too complex. And because it's the web, you can connect anything to anything, you don't need to AT Protoize your code, or ActivityPublish it. Just plain old RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, thank you very much. #
- "I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable."#
I asked ChatGPT for a
list of FeedLand features that are new or distinctive. "FeedLand combines RSS, OPML, public curation, subscribable reading lists, rivers, categories, and realtime WebSocket updates in a way that is unusual among feed readers and points toward a web-native social network."
#People who believe in the web, stop dissing
RSS, it’s an important part of our future.
#Alexa has a terrible habit, when I ask for a song from the Echo on my desktop, it ends each song with a helpful message. There's a live version of this song, do you want to hear it. You have a message waiting, can I play it for you. I can't get it to stop. I have a bunch of them scattered around the house, and this is the only one that does it. I'm writing here, I asked for a song that fit in with my writing. Stop making me thinkg about your marketing messages. Where did you get the idea you can do this. A paying customer.
#Love: I ask Claude for a list of names and values, it responds quickly with exactly what I asked for. Nothing more. Unconsciously I say "perfect" -- out loud.
#I have a Mac laptop that I keep updated with the latest versions of Mac OS. I got a warning today saying that
Electric Drummer won't run on the next release of the OS. Now I don't use it very much if at all on that machine, but I wonder. ED is an Electron app, otherwise it's wholly JavaScript. It does include some Node packages of course, but not that many IIRC. This was a thing I wasn't expecting.
#
I just tried the
latest version of the X editor. It's got all the features of
textcasting. I wrote a
test post entitled "X has nuked the limits, time for Bluesky to follow suit." I think you can tell I had fun writing it. They don't think anyone hears me, but I think they're wrong about that. The idea that they are part of the web is ludicrous. They're going to get called on it eventually. They should
fix it so they are part of the web. Then we can all create. Or if you're not going to be part of the web, for crying out loud stop saying that you do.
#One of the benefits of using Claude for all my coding is I'm now finding out what various things I do as standard practice are called in the outside world. Today I learned what agile is. I of course have heard it used, and even got to know the guy who coined the term.
#There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you've been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you've done all you can there, and it's time for someone else to work at that level. The new person, Smith, is a maintainer, develops in small increments, fixes bugs and most important takes feature requests from the other developer, Jones, who is now creating Level N + 1. Jones is a good person to do this because they know everything about the capabilities of the lower level. But now they're going to pretend they've forgotten all that, and is looking at a whole new machine, created out of the new capabilities of Level N. That's how you build any complex layered piece of software. And because this is the method used in boostraps, you can build level N+1 using tools written in N.
#
- My recommendation for Automattic and Bluesky.#
- Bluesky supports RSS 2.0 inbound and outbound.#
- Bluesky eliminates its character limit, allows bold, italic styles. Links. Optional titles. Users can edit their posts. More here. #
- Automattic already fully supports RSS 2.0 in both directions, in all their products.#
- This gives us the most interop with the most respect for prior art. No need to reinvent. There's nothing special about Bluesky, they can use what we've all been using for 20+ years. #
- It's really very simple, let's hook everything together and let the users and developers create.#
Another way to look at Claude Code. It's a way to talk to your code, to ask it questions, and tell it how you want it to change.
#I think maybe it's time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can't seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It's a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I'm not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That's what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it. It's one of those famous
coral reefs but it hasn't been born yet. The idea would not be to compete with WordPress, it's to make something that fits into our view of the world, that just happens to be the same codebase. And when on the other side they think they have to do it themselves we reach out and say here, just take this over, it's yours. It's so hard to penetrate the awareness inside old organizations with new ideas. I think it's the manifest destiny of WordPress, that what they have now is a nice revenue generating machine, but it's not serving as the web's writing base, which is what imho it was supposed to be. (And I have a bit of standing there, btw.)
#I have news for you -- Claude forgets important stuff. I catch it forgetting to do things it was "programmed" to do. It's not a computer, it's not garbage in garbage out. It could be good stuff in garbage out. As I've said before there's a big chunk of the app I'm working on where I don't read code. User interface stuff only. No control of what comes in our out. Trying to not take any chances here.
#This is a multi-billion dollar idea. I want to link to "report-up" concept in something I'm writing. There is no Wikipedia page for that but there is a brief explainer in Google, via their AI. Here's the feature: add a permalink to that response. I'm lazy and will link to it in my writing.
#BTW, I don't think the web was created to make people rich.
#Does it ever cross anyone's mind that according to the rules of war, Iran would be totally justified in attacking the United States?
#
Vibe-coded software will have a place where users can communicate what they want to developers who can help make it real. The same way you might get medical info from an AI, but would still get your colonoscopy from an actual doctor. Part of the origin story of podcasting is that Adam hacked up a version of Frontier to illustrate what he had in mind for the "last yard" protocol. When I looked at the code it was horrible, hard to believe someone thought of doing it that way. But it got the point across, and that's the moment the podcasting boostrap began. I love using the AIs to tell a
visual story, a skill I never had or developed. No reason it can't work the same way for software.
#
- In yesterday's podcast I mentioned a Microsoft promotional video from the 90s. JY Stervinou on Twitter asked if he had found it, and it was close but it was the video I was talking about. So I checked in with Claude with this prompt.#
- there was a microsoft promotional video in the 90s featuring bill gates and steve ballmer riding up front in a car, it's a ripoff of a volkswagon commercial, the music is catchy song Da Da Da. they drive around and then see a Sun Microsystems computer, they pick it up but it smells bad (apparently) and they drop it off in someone's garbage. i can't find the video on the web, can you?#
- It found a low rez version of the video on YouTube, with a comment.#
- It's a spoof of the 1997 Volkswagen Golf commercial, with Ballmer and Gates driving a Golf, picking up a Sun workstation and later rejecting it. The "Da Da Da" track is by the German band Trio. One source describes the dropped computer as an old IBM rather than Sun, so accounts differ on that detail, but the Know Your Meme listing specifically says Sun workstation, matching what you remember.#
- Here's the low-rez video at 1/4 size.#
- The computer in the video I saw was definitely a Sun workstation. It wouldn't make much sense for it to be an IBM in 1997, Microsoft had already passed over IBM, they were in the middle of the Java Wars with Sun, and there even is a Sun response to the Microsoft video with two actors playing Gates and Ballmer, and in the end Sun CEO Scott McNealy shows up, after (it turns out) Gates smells and the Sun terminal is still in the back seat and users and developers are still nowhere in sight.#
- I imagine there are a few old time Microsoft people still following this blog, if anyone has a decent resolution version of the Da Da Da video, I'd love to get a good version on the web of 2026.#
Just finished
No Country for Old Men, the book by
Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it's one of those movies that if you're looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is pretty good on its own. I didn't realize that they used most of McCarthy's dialog, literally -- in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a
story about old age. "There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for." I love truths that hit hard. He's such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if I get a mind to.
#I'm going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines.
#Just asked Claude to save this in memory. "in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere." i'm getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn't have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing.
#Marc Andreessen
said programmers aren't disoccupied, we haven't become obsolete, quite the opposite, we're all working around the clock. It's true. Everyone is doing it. We got a
new brain that can do all kinds of amazing things. You don't get a new super powerful brain organ every day.
#
Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn't mean it's true.
#I couldn't not say anything about
the Knicks win last night in the
opening game of the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks were losing, then winning big, then fell apart, and by midway through the 4th quarter they were down by 22, and the Clevelands were completely in charge. But then the Knicks came back, miraculously tied the game so it went into overtime where the Knicks dominated, and won. Actually it wasn't really a miracle, it was somewhat predictable. The Knicks were playing on a lot of rest, and one of the big advantages they have this year over last is a deep and strong bench and a coach who plays them (last year's coach didn't). So the Knicks didn't get tired and the Cavs were wiped out by the 4th quarter. Their shots weren't long or short, aimed, they had no flow, they weren't getting rebounds, they didn't have good ball movement. While Brunson was driving the Knicks the Cavs just weren't there. When things started turning around in the 4th I was pretty sure the Knicks would win. I had no basis for believing this, coming back from 22 down so late in the game is pretty unlikely. In most cities that's when the fans start heading home, but not in NYC. We stay till the end because sometimes, maybe often with this years' Knicks, the team you think is going to lose actually ends up winning.
#I've been following
Jake's work privately, but now he's blogging about it publicly. I totally look forward to running Frontier on today's hardware. I especially want to run Manila on one of my home computers, and use it for Linux server apps. I've forgotten so much about how Manila works, but I expect it'll all come back. We had a great team back in the Manila days -- we all used the product, and it was and will be again one of the most powerful and pragmatic programming environments ever.
#Claude Code doesn't know about "user perspective," but it learns quickly. The UI of the software we're working on is fenced off, I use it, but I don't read code in there. I don't want to know how it works, I want to use it and getting right. This is an important technique. Later once things are locked down, I don't mind learning more about how it was done.
#
