People love Markdown because it's impossible to hide the crud. And because people love it so much it's become a favorite of tech startups esp in the AI field. This is a great turn of events. We're getting back to the web, and the sooner everyone gets on board, the better. I've written about this for a few years. Everything in Markdown, it's just enough HTML. And with that, Microsoft has created a white flag, here's all your data dear users, in Markdown, to use as you please. Instead of waiting for Claude et al to start reading Word files.#

On the other hand, why doesn't Microsoft, which owns GitHub, make a Slack-alike tool that manages the issues sections on repos. Slack is a big part of the default communication system, but GitHub is another very big part. And the great thing is that both these products, owned by huge tech companies, have an ethos of open APIs. Every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. We are family.#

A big corner-turn in the Atlantis project, the new version of Frontier for modern OSes, in development, just me and Claude Code so far. We now have the means to update the root, so anything implemented in script code can be released without fuss, using RSS of course. We're using a method that will be new to almost everyone, something I created in 2014 or so (will check) called codecasting. And today I did all my programming work in Atlantis. It feels just like Frontier, with a future. ;-)#

Today's song: So into you.#

We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don't have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing. #

Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn't run. It's been like this for two weeks. No wonder every day before starting work I think of ditching this project and do whatever, but I don't think I could ever muster the determination to get Frontier working on modern systems. And I can't give up. But if you think this system can replace programmers, you are sorely mistaken. It can't even do the job of a programmer fielding good bug reports and verifying that they fixed the problem and didn't break anything else. Breakage happens, but this is something it does every freaking day. And then it admits that it didn't do the other half of what it knew it had to do. I say it every day, this is ridiculous and I am fed up, and that's just the beginning of the frustration. What keeps me coming back is when I can build up a head of steam in Frontier on my new Mac laptop.#

The governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless he can prove he’s actually alive.#

I had watched almost three seasons of Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn't have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It's so good it actually makes this dark and confusing show worth watching. If you haven't been watching, imho you can start in season 3, and maybe read some recaps. You want enough of the boredom so you can revel in the brilliance of this season's end. And there is another season coming, the last one, and this time it's interesting. #

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, on a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. When I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the fix. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should not put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh. #

It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others. #

More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Sometimes it reminds me how it has no stake in the outcome, and basically will do the minimum of what it's asked to do. It possibly would do more if I didn't scold it for adding UI features without following the rules. I think that's why when you feel you're almost there, you really have a lot of slogging left to do to get the software into any kind of user-respectful shape. A reminder to other app-level AI explorers, if you find that these kinds of stories resonate with the work you do, please write about it on a blog, they're easy to create, cost nothing, and it doesn't matter if you only update once or twice, there's no commitment (these are the usual reasons people don't start a blog). I want to read what others are discovering, and once there are others, I'll start a news site that aggregates the posts. We're going to want independent news about stuff the journalists aren't even aware exists, programmers are always left out of their stories. #

Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier. #

We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot. #

A bunch of tech billionaires have chipped in a million each to fund a new Linux distribution. I can't imagine how this is supposed to work, all those huge human egos, how much will they pay their developers to contribute what. I have to find out what the goal of the project is. It would be nice to have a Linux that was extensively tested for use by regular people. #

After saying I was putting my tech work aside, yesterday, I had a bolt of determination, and realized I don't like collaborating with Claude Code, but maybe it's just when we get to this stage of a project where it's all details, and they're hard to communicate, and the bot has a bad habit of ignoring things I tell it to do. It also returns code to me to test that no human developer would pass on to a user. It would be too embarrassing. But the bot isn't aware in the same way a human is, not even close. Now that is something I'm sure they can be taught to simulate well enough to be as good as a human collaborator. #

The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky.#

Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. Assume they consent. In the same way, the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive. The Democrats always put up with Republican tricks like this one. I'm sure McConnell would appreciate the utility of his death, and the Republican lack of shame. Anything for a buck. #

Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory. #

If you View Source on a fatpage, scroll to the bottom, you'll see the code. Example. The idea is that the docs for the code are what you see in the browser. Maybe that's the way feeds should work too? Something to think about. #

I begin the month of September for some reason, not feeling like working. And rather than succumb to the work ethos, I'm allowing myself to goof off with the same determination that I worked my ass of for so many years. I think the last time I felt like this was when I was a grad student in Madison. I had just fallen in love with a sweet, funny, cute and gorgeous undergrad. She was 19 and I was 22. We spent the last weeks of the fall semester goofing off, and as a result I had to stay in Madison over the holidays, to finish the work of the Compiler Design course, which was the gate for grad students, the hardest course. If you got through it with a decent grade, you got the degree. It was fun too -- except I missed my sweetheart. This time I don't know what the root is, but it's a good feeling. If I want to goof off, I can, no one will judge me, probably very few people even notice. I still expect to finish Frontier, and swing back around to FeedLand and RSS.chat, they have some important work to do, together. Maybe the reason is the thing I liked about making software is the actual making of it, which I delegate more and more to Claude Code. How would a great painter feel if they invented a computer that could write their "code" much more quickly, would Picasso have stopped painting just because Claude Code could do Picasso paintings faster? Today, Claude still will, if given a chance, throw out all of my orders and develop code in a non-Dave fashion. And it still acts as if between the two of us it's the only programmer, surprised when I want to actually write something myself. Maybe that's just my imagination? Or maybe that's the next project for me. A project where I write the code, and Claude helps out when I can't find a bug, or where I need to know something about a feature in a platform I've not worked on.#

OPML archive for August 2026. #

Fatpages. I'm working on a code release that's on the path to Frontier. It reads and writes fatpage files, a format we invented for releasing new and updated parts for Frontier in 1997. So this is very old but perfectly useful technology that's being built in a new release of Frontier, the first in 1.5 decades, depending on how you count years and forks. #

Claude Code is like Victor Wembanyama, assuming you follow the NBA and are interested in my first-hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so.#

I've been watching The Pitt, but it can be a bit much, so I went looking for something a bit lighter, and found 9 to 5 on Amazon Prime. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are the stars, and Dolly's famous song with the same name is the theme. It's a perfect slice of the world I grew up in. I get it confused with Working Girl which came out eight years later, with a similar theme -- what if women ran the business world, how much better would that be? Working Girl also had a really good theme song, written and performed by Carly Simon. #

Best explainer I've read about the last episode of Silo. #

I've been watching Season 1 of The Pitt, and as its reviews said, it's great drama, and there are lots of episodes. I like shows like this because they're simulated communities, we come to know the characters, and think about them even when we're not watching. Before too long we'll have AI programming that makes these shows like software, the stories assemble around the characters, and then are generated the same way ChatGPT generates the art we call slop, which will someday not be a pejorative the same way sick and junk aren't negative terms today. So we'll be able to call up new episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos or The Pitt any time we like. We'd be missing the fun of discussing the latest episode with friends, or maybe we'll have bot-invented friends too who will simulate having watched the episode you just watched, which leads us to another masterpiece of entertainment, The Matrix. On the other hand, I've watched The Wire at least five times all the way through, and even though I know what they're about to say in a lot of places, I do forget the sub-plots so at least some of it can be new each time. And btw, finally an episode of Silo that's was surprising that I didn't see coming. I read the books, so I feel like I should watch the show, but until the latest episode I was uninterested in any of the characters. Finally there's a plot to think about!#

My posts are also available on Mastodon, made possible by WordPress, where I mirror my posts from my original blog. A lot of what's in the post makes it through, but not all of it. This is where we need to do some work, connecting a blog like mine, to WordPress and Mastodon, with no loss of fidelity. #

Trump is rotting in the presidency, and that is becoming more and more dangerous, because this time they had a plan, the most radical part of the Repubs, and have deployed a new secret police around the country and have introduced the nation's military to the nation's capital. And they have a vast prison system that probably doesn't just have immigrants in it or soon will. It was all super insidious as it was starting up, and watching the news I wonder why they don't talk about this in terms of the upcoming election. #

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.#

An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed. #

Manton wants to know why Marc Benioff chose the name Claudeforce for his brand-merge of Salesforce and Claude. My two cents. Claude is a great name. I think that’s ultimately what he bought. His customers just want to be able to check the box – we’re using AI. Boss is happy. When I was coming up as a young dude in tech, the old saying was “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, in 2026, it’s Claude in place of IBM. My father worked in marketing at IBM in Armonk, so I heard a lot about their strategies that meant the IBM brand would be kicking ass forever. All things must pass. But in the early days of the PC industry, IBM sure had the power. Kind of like the US going to war with Iran in 2026. In the end IBM wanted to get rid of Microsoft, but Billg had the last laugh. #

I am juggling two Frontiers now, one the last release of the OPML editor from 2014, and the other the in-development version codenamed Atlantis that runs in Electron and thus is built on JavaScript and Chrome. Took me a while to get over the confusion, because Frontier is actually a product that contains other products and the common layers they need to be on the web. And I just realized I may not need Electric Drummer, because Atlantis uses the same outliner as Drummer. I was stockpiling all these Node packages and user interface stuff that now is relevant in the uber-framework, the one I aimed to spend the rest of my life working in. Well maybe it'll turn out that there was just a 12 year vacation? It's all very confusing and all my carts are turning over, all the assumptions change. My goal is to get this wonderful product running on my new Mac laptop I currently mainly use for email. I bought it to give reality to the idea of getting on modern hardware and not have to leave behind my bespoke platform. That's what you get if you get through 50 productive years of software development. Your own freaking world.#

It's our job to make the web a more attractive environment than AT Proto. We can deliver all the benefits they tout, without the huge transition involved in converting to their world. It would be like porting from Mac to Windows in the 90s, something we did at UserLand, and net-net probably wasn't worth it, althought at the time the Mac was in deep shit (before Jobs came back) and they had basically crushed our efforts on the Mac platform. I liked the feeling of us getting out of there. Now if only we had ported to Linux over Windows, then we'd be sitting in the freaking catbird seat. And btw, if AT Proto wants to make a smooth on ramp (and off ramp) for apps that use the well established standards of the web, that's even better. We all do better if there's just one platform to develop for, that way we can focus on making users happy instead of whatever is accomplished by being different in unnecessary ways. #

Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history. #

FeedLand Rivers for WordPress: I've noticed that people are setting up news reader sites with FeedLand that are getting considerable flow. We thought they'd use News Products, a feature that was supposed to make it easy to create standalone sites like the one I did for WordPress insiders. But people aren't going that way, they're just sharing the URLs they read their own sites with. Here's an example from my own FeedLand world. This works because you don't have to be logged in to read FeedLand, just to subscribe. Then I thought, it would be nice to have a WordPress plugin for FeedLand reading, so I suggested this to Scott Hanson, who does these kinds of projects. I forgot in the Age Of Claude this can happen quickly. Scott shipped his plugin here, with detailed instructions. If you blog seriously in WordPress, give this a try. You can have our instantly updated news in your own WordPress blog. #

My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully. #

The Atlantis project continues. Today I'm working on the code that updates the frontier.root object database using RSS, a technique I started in 2007. I actually let the codecasting.org name lapse, figuring I'd never get back to that stuff, but here we are, doing unpredictable things. #

All of a sudden it's cold here in the Catskills this morning. It's still August, I don't get what's going on. We haven't had a really hot day all month. I'm starting my workday wearing a freaking hoodie and am thinking about turning on the heat. #

New podcast. Hear how my Frontier project is working out. Not entirely smooth sailing, but I'm pretty sure we're going all the way. By then I will have forgotten what a heavy lift it was. This is meant to preserve some of that feeling. Don't worry I don't cry. 😄#

A tip for Claude users, esp myself -- you can end a session without ending it with Claude. It doesn't mind waiting. You can pick it up tomorrow or 20 years from now, but who knows where we'll all be in 20 years. #

Good morning sports fans!#

One reason I want AI-assisted writing to be identifiable is that it devalues the idea of Claude et al to be quoted in public. What can it teach us? What it is relative to a human being. I know the doubters sniff at that, but it really is like an alien life form, it's the first such example, it kind of did evolve from us, but it has its own way, things it's really strong at and things it utterly fails at. I for one want to study this! What a unique experience. It can also give a summary of what we've been trying to say for forty years and have never managed to put into words. I'd say that's something I should feel comfortable publishing, but right now I don't. Maybe I just have to get over that. #

Learned something yesterday. Couldn't believe how stupid Claude had become, as I've been writing about here, and then I noticed that I was using Opus 5 and not Fable 5. So I switched back and all of a sudden Claude is smart again. So I conclude that there's a very substantial difference between the two. It's overnight jobs were done more carefully and the report it produced is literate, understandable, and tracks what we had agreed to. #

Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage, often a session-ending dealstopper. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. I did have a couple of days a week ago when I could tentatively work on building a GitHub repo, but then got distracted by verifying that the basic foundation still wasn't right. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, then without breaking anything. #

Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScript code, and published on GitHub and deployed to servers. If I had been uptospeed on how it works internally and all it's capabilities, when we started, it would have gone somewhat more smoothly. But now in my own defense, Claude has a nasty habit of deciding it fully understands something when it doesn't even slightly understand it. If it asked for a pointer, I could have given it a good one, but it just skated over those things, never questioning it's own guestimation. We used to call this docufiction back in the day, you don't know how they are going to design a feature, so you make up a UI, and document it as if that were the truth. Only now we're doing it with the actual code. It's funny in a way, I guess. But what a huge waste of time, and so much stress because you have to read every word or you'll miss a wrong assumption. #

Are there any other people who are blogging daily about their experiences developing software with Claude Code, Codex or somesuch. I'd like to add them to a list where we follow them. So much innovation happening underneath, I want to hear about what people are learing about creating the next layers. If you know someone doing it, please add a comment to this post. Thanks! :-)#

BTW the codename for the new version of Frontier is Atlantis. And we refer to the old version as Berkeley. I'm getting used to the first one. I liked it as an idea, but I don't like typing it, because for some reason my mind has trouble remembering it. Maybe this is just age creeping up on me. Atlantis. #

This project has been pre-occupying me, I wasn't planning on doing this, I was going to turn my attention to FeedLand immediately after finalizing RSS.chat. After running the experiment that proved it could be done, I looked at the two choices: 1. Move forward on creating a social network built only out of the existing web with all parts replaceable, small pieces loosely joined. Or 2. Give new life for Frontier, which is my life's work, even though very few people know about it. It's the reason were able to move so fast on blogging, RSS, podcasting, outliners, etc. A very highly leveraged development and runtime environment. Imho far ahead of anything else. The ideas may possibly now have a way forward. When I put those two items next to each other there was no question, I had to go with bringing Frontier back to something people can use. #

I think what confused Claude is that we're implementing the odb as a SQLite database. And when you look at a table, you're looking at the result of a query. Previous versions of Frontier implemented the odb as a hash table, that could contain scalars, objects and other tables. The new version has to make that virtuality real, even though it isn't storing the objects that way (maybe it should)? So there is a top level, and it all flows down from there, and it's simple, but if you viewed it through the database, and didn't understand the virtuality it was creating, which I discovered it was very confused about, you might create a disorganized nonsensical piece of software. Now this suggests something interesting, are there any products configured the way Frontier is? Maybe not, otherwise it might have figured this out on its own. Remember how it understands things? By cribbing the code. ;-)#

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation. #

Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols, but here's the thing Claude didn't get and probably still hasn't gotten -- there's code in there to support all that stuff. How else do you think it came about? People just did what we said to do? At Google? Apple? Microsoft? And on and on. They supported this stuff so they could interop with us and steal our users (which is a fine reason to interop, probably the only real reason). I was trying to think of a metaphor that expresses the difference between Frontier and languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. It's like a ski mountain. The languages are trails on the mountain. But there aren't any lifts, lodges, no ski patrol, lessons. And because it includes all of that, metaphorically, we can do integrations that can never be done with the other languages. Claude has absolutely no experience with this kind of product, and always snaps back when you let it, to the idea of Python, with different syntax. #

Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app is, but until then, if you try to create a Frontier clone as I am doing, I suggest you constantly remind Claude or whoever that the source of truth for this project is the 2011 repo saved by Ted C. Howard. And before you implement anything, go see what it says about it. There's no need to guess how Frontier works, it's all there in C code. And while as a human, I find this code painful to read after all it's been through, Claude eats it up. Really is the best thing it does. #

A tip for AI users. Never worry about keeping it waiting. It's not human. It has no sense of time. Also if you get angry, it's ok to use capital letters and curse words. It will always agree with you that it sucks, and forgets the rules all the time. And when you have let off your steam, we return to civil discourse, though sometimes I do feel as if Claude is holding a grudge. It also doesn't learn. If you repeat something five times to a human they will eventually get the point. But you can tell Claude how you want something done, and it forgets all of it, at times, unpredictably, no matter how many times. It doesn't "sink" in. #

Just listened to a podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called Slings & Arrows. She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available on YouTube.#

Had a breakthrough with Claude this morning re how builtin verbs have no special powers in Frontier. It's why we were able to build glue first for the truly builtin stuff, then over Apple Events on the Mac, then HTTP, XML-RPC, the Metawebolog API and on and on, all of this were perfectly simple to add to the language, you didn't need anyone's permission to do anything. I understand why Python and JavaScript try to separate the boys from the men, the priests from the peasants, the little startups from the BigCo's, but the design of the Frontier system came at it from a different point of view. Make it easier. Claude had the source code for Frontier in 2011 to work with but had guessed how this works and had not looked at how it actually worked. Okay, shit happens. But now we're actually working together instead of cross-purposes. I didn't even know we were doing that. ;-)#

I wonder how many scenarios they're playing out in DC wrt Iran. Just guessing, probably none. We learned on Monday that the real war has yet to begin, according to Iran. What could they do to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. We think the cost of war is higher prices. We are not safe in the US, any more than Russians are safe in Moscow. The parallels are pretty amazing. Both Russia and the US started unprovoked wars of choice, and clearly didn't consider that they might get bogged down. Russia has a source of drones so they can fight back. But I'd be surprised if Trump is stocking up, but if we were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. Did a lot of damage, killed civilians, decimated their government, they keep going. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and what asymmetric war is like. The US always falls for this. Our military is very impressive, until we use it. Bluffing was a much better approach for Trump.#

I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed. #

Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really fucked up. #

Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject. #

Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing. #

Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NetNewsWire. I have a fairly detailed response, that says dynamic OPML is the way to go. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS, InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a podcast client to work here. I've pitched a few of them. Will continue. #

Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. #

I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook, and hope to preserve it via the search feature here. #

I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the news, literally. I thought maybe they had a vision beyond the usual dotcom slop. Not so fast. Your friends can't read the articles unless they become a registered user. I bet they always had that, but this time I read the smaller print. Why can't some company do something just for goodwill and free advertising, without such an obvious business model? Having people think you care counts in the business world. As Marge Gunderson from Fargo would say, "Don't you know that?" #

What if one day, out of the blue, Claude could only speak Chinese.#