There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with
Caddy, not sure why -- but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it. In diagnosing the problem I used Claude, it asked all kinds of questions, gave me commands to run, and I dutifully reported back the results like a good servant. It's so funny to be a tool for the cyborg. Then it hit me, why don't they offer servers with built-in maintenance by Claude. I would type commands at like "install the following apps on this new server I want to commission, and check into it every so often and if it's running out of some resource, get in touch with me and let me know how much more it'll cost, and I'll just use it and you can keep it running." I think it's a really nice application for AI.
#I wanted to subscribe to the
GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can
read the feed in a browser, and my
feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push.
#
A bit of history. Read this
post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in
2006 and
2026.
#
Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that
Jack Dorsey posted his
first tweet. He also noted it was the day that
Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on
Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by
Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the
World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities -- but nothing stuck. I came close once, with
Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to
Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch
bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser -- to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier -- and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again -- only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the
feediverse. Even if it doesn't work. ;-)
#BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
#
- I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This started as a comment in reply to Colin Devroe on Mastodon, but quickly exceeded its 500 character limit. And no doubt I will expand on it over the course of the day. #
- Here's the issue. AT Proto is proposing to be a better web than the collection of standards that make up the web in 2026, starting with HTTP and HTML and DNS and including Markdown, WebSockets, MP3 and RSS and probably a few others. Maybe they can come up with something better organized and with more consistent interfaces. But the web doesn't work that way. Once it embraces a method of doing something, it goes on, and doesn't reconsider. It's exactly like evolution in the natural world. #
- Example: RSS was a deeply entrenched competitor when Atom came along, intending to do everything RSS did but do it differently and better. It did get some support and still does to this day, but the differences are flattened out, most feed-reading software doesn't know if the news came from RSS or Atom, the distinction is buried in low-level code.#
- If you were to look at the size of the developer base for the web, it would be clear how steep a hill AT Proto has to climb, and why? What's in it for Bluesky except satisfaction of ego? Not a good business proposition for a startup. #
- But they can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That's where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned. #
- Colin, I don't think they should do it for you and me, they should do it as an investment in their future. Get in the game. The idea of creating something that stands alone is imho very un-web, and not differentiated from their competition. The web was made for small companies like Bluesky. Trying to act like a giant in a way even the biggest giants wouldn't work is not a formula for success. I think Toni and Matt would understand this.#
- The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me. #
- There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.#
- The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.#
- The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.#
- The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.#
Quick note on
Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having
developed a
few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.
#Knight Foundation: "How did a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life find itself on a cap table with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta to invest in a tech startup?" Imho because they misled you.
#
Thinking about linkblogging, my
blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other.
#I wanted to change the URL for the
source namespace in the
RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, from http to https. I thought this might be a nice warmup project. Started at 9AM and it's now 10:45AM and it might work now. Let's see. Nope. Thought of something I didn't do. Let's see.
Yes! We
win, sorta. Bing?
#I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a
linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools?
#
Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF in 1979. Skiing. And other miscellanea. BTW, I didn't even remember the quote correctly and I might have misinterpreted it. It's still a good story imho. ;-)
#
Small update to the
source namespace.
source:localTime is a channel-level element. It was incorrectly stated that it is item-level.
#I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.
#
I asked Claude: "What is OpenClaw useful for? Do you think I could use it in my programming work, based on what you know about what I do?" Basically it's for non-programmers. Then I asked: "I wonder if I could make software that would be useful to people who love OpenClaw?" That was more interesting and included in the response I linked to, above.
#
- A clip from a video interview with Marc Andreessen has been making the rounds. He was a very successful entrepreneur in the early days of the web and has been a very successful venture capitalist in years following. He's 54 years old. You should watch the clip before reading what it inspired me to say, on Bluesky and below, after a lot of consideration. I kept it about me, and my experience, not coming to any conclusions about him or anyone else.#
- I went through a heavy duty midlife crisis when I was in my early 40s. I started seeing a therapist. I was depressed because I had achieved everything I was supposed to, I learned later, but didn't get the love and acceptance I felt I deserved. #
- The therapist kept asking about my childhood and my relationship with my parents. I said I really don't want to do this. Why can't I keep going the way I have been going (as pmarca describes). "You can do that, she said -- but you won't have as rich of a life."#
- So I gave it a try, and it was the beginning of an education that somehow I had missed. Inside I had come to conclusions that were flat-out wrong. I got to know myself. I stopped thinking others were responsible for things that didn't make me happy. Usually it was me, projecting on them. #
- I learned how to get what I want. She was right. I'm still learning 30 years later.#
- I'm software developer, that's really all I wanted to do -- and blogging and podcasting, ideation and programming. I made the career I wanted, both before and after the therapy sessions that got me started on my trip through myself. I've learned that I am driven by my subconscious, the feeler, even though my concscious self, the thinker, denies there is such a thing. #
- Whether you accept it or not, you do have feelings and you are driven by them. #
- One of the great things about going inward is you learn to relate to the subconscious, to form a team -- a parent-child relationship, where the subconscious is the all-powerful child, and the conscious can see things the child is too self-centered, too narcissistic to see. There are other people around, and the things that freak out the child often aren't dangerous. But if they are, the parent is there to help, but that's all it can do. The power is with the child. Lots more to say about this. And btw, yes, I am very woke, relatively speaking -- having lived in Northern California for 30+ years, and have sampled all kinds of workshops and retreats, and visit my hot tub most days, to remember that I don't only exist in my mind, something programmers are particularly subject to -- because we do a lot of thinking, it's a big part of what we do. All the while we still have the body, the child, ready to flee or attack, if danger should come. Or ready to feel glee when what you just did worked the first time. 😄#
Thinking about the
SAVE Act,
60 Minutes should do a segment on what you have to go through to get a
birth certificate in any random state. It's a lot of work, I've had to do it twice in the last few years. You'd have to be a pretty committed voter to be willing to do all that work. I imagine it would be even harder if you're black, and it's going to be hugely hard for married women who changed their last name when they got married. And how much you want to bet they don't accept birth certificates from Muslim countries? It is the biggest scam ever, and if the journalists don't cover it that way, always, with no both-sides-isms, then we should all know this is the end of journalism in the US. And btw also the end of real elections in the US too. The Repubs these days like to say they're against the "deep state" -- well my friends this is about the most deep state bullshit ever.
#
They've been having intelligent and clear-thinking guests on CNN and MSNOW on the coverage of the Iran War, unusually good discourse. But the best coverage I've heard has been from Frontiline podcasts. There's a
new one out, haven't listened to it yet, but the one I heard
yesterday was very informative and probably a better briefing than our president has been getting (or paying attention to).
#
The thing that we all missed is that WordPress is the best candidate for a standard for what an individual social network message is.
#
An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses. We add some of our own metadata, that's how it is extensible. It's open source, and it's evolved for 20+ years, with a strong ethos of not breaking devs. It could have been twitter, or masto or even bluesky, but they don't show through enough features to be useful as "web text." We want to use all the features of text on the web. I may be the only one who sees this but I predict in a couple of years if we aren't subsumed by AI everyone will say they always knew this is
what WordPress is for.
😄 #If I knew how AI would work with software, I would've done things differently to prepare for this. I find myself wanting to ask questions about my code that I don't have proper tools to answer. I have to get all my code managed with the new system, but not sure that's even the right way to go. Once I started using it to build full bits of deployed code, not to just answer questions about the work I'm doing one day at a time, I've become confused about planning my own work.
#I added
Paul Graham to my blogroll at scripting.com. Another massive oversight.
#
Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful -- because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it
slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out.
#I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the
torrent of posts by my blogger friend
ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it.
#24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are
less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons.
#
If we can get the web to come back,
Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are
expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto -- but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care.
#As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful
screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world."
#We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem
yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted
an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we
don't need -- BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web.
#Happy Friday The 13th! ;-)
#
Substack would be the web's printer, if they supported
inbound RSS.
#Bluesky is actually pretty close to being on the web. The biggest missing piece is
inbound RSS. They already support outbound, it could use a review and tuneup, but that half is mostly there. I would even go a bit further, if they really supported RSS, it would
be the web.
#Just added
Daring Fireball to my blogroll. What a huge oversight. Glad to get this fixed.
#
- Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT: #
- "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble." #
- Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.#
- A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses. I could switch over, but then all the images and included files posted before 2014 or so would break. The minor gain in security on a site that doesn't ask for any private information, is totally not worth throwing out all the work I did on a site that actually has historic importance is just a bad deal. It would be a solving a problem no one but Google has (and it's not even clear what that problem is, and why I should care). There's a principle here too -- letting one company dictate to us how the web works, well I got into the web to get away from that. #
- Anyway, the reason they still use http in a place where one expects https is apparently is the same reason. It would break things that they don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down. I'm pretty sure it's a bug I unknowingly introduced. #
- PS: When I'm calling through the API, I get back a record that has a different guid from what's in the feed. Seems like the API and the feed should be in agreement. This is the code that gets the post record. My guess to get them into agreement, I'm going to have to hack this, changing https to http. And there is the reason they can't fix this, and just have to live with this mess. I think overall the people who manage the feed and the API are doing a pretty great job, btw. You have to know I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it. #
- PPS: I reported the problem once it was fully diagnosed, on the WordPress repo for Calypso.#
- Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite. #
Trump’s naive attacks or threats against Iran, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Cuba and lack of support for Ukraine guarantee that every country that doesn’t have nukes is going to be working overtime to get them. Assuming they don’t already have the equiv of the Strait of Hormuz. Assuming the world survives Trump do you really think they’re going to let the US have as much power as it has up until Trump? They and we have to limit the power of all countries big and small. Trump is the warning that you can’t assume things will always be as they always have been.
#
Yesterday, I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb!#- An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy. #
- It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do." #
The Guardian is the coolest news org, paywall-wise. Why don't they innovate, and create a
EZ-Pass for news, and run it for other high quality, reader centered pubs. We pay $1 per article read. That's how I as a reader want to do it. I don't like subscriptions.
#
I found out recently that my blog is in of the default startup set for
NetNewsWire. What an honor to be included. Thanks
Brent! ;-)
#
- Bluesky has a new CEO, Toni Schneider former CEO of Automattic. I have known Toni for many years, dating back to his startup, Oddpost, that I praised on my blog, and his partner was then quoted in Wired saying Scripting News is media. That meant a lot to me at the time, and it was true. I was very proud that I had played a small part in their success. #
- I had a virtual meeting with Toni a couple of years ago about their identity product, then in development, urging them to include storage in it, but as far as I know that didn't happen. #
- Toni believes that Bluesky is a distributed social media app, but I've been all around this, wrote some software for their protocol to see if I was missing something, and concluded that it's typical tech industry hype, there's no reality to the claim. They're selling something they don't have, and I don't think they can do it and preserve the feature set of their product. #
- Here's a search for Bluesky on my blog. You can see that I have taken a great interest in the product. #
- Scripting News unfortunately is not as influential as it once was when I praised Oddpost, but I think this advice is equally valuable as it was in 2002. I think the shortest path for Bluesky to achieve its vision is to hook up with WordPress, that would give us a path into it that is decentralized. If we ever talk about this, ironically, I will be selling Toni on his own product. #
Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because
I don’t know."
#
An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word
reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a
definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor.
#
My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)#- BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton. #
- If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers. #
I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app. #- Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently. #
- I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be. #
- And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood. #
Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes,
do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't
understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about
enshittification and that's right -- but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up.
Still diggin!#Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate.
#
Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A
piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference."
#
If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.
#
Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users.
#I was
looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but
found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers
loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too.
#
- I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom. #
- Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone. #
- Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that. #
- Happened to the Mac too#
- In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac. #
- A blogroll for 2026#
- BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.#
- It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory. #
- You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site. #
- My old ass#
- I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory. #
- I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.#
Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?
#
Remember when, just weeks ago, the
Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The
video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video.
#
I remember liking the first three seasons of
Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a
Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore.
#If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please
RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help.
#
On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT.
#
The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a
home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented.
#What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.
#We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean.
#
I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser."
Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new.
#Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a
nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a
priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these
mind bombs for me.
#I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file.
Like this.
#
"It really tastes like a pizza!!"
#
Very happy to welcome my old friend,
John Palfrey, back to the web. His
first new piece is about his experience at the
AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my
blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)
#
- I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)#
- They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.#
- Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.#
- It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference. #
- Some of my takeaways from the meetup.#
- Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be. #
- What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.#
- Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed. #
- Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄#
- More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new. #
- I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects. #
- One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress. #
- I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong. #
If you followed me
on Twitter, please follow me
on Bluesky or
Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.
#A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.
#
Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff. #- It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it. #
- I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that). #
- Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this. #
- Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub. #
- I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops. #
- Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format. #
Podcast:
Why men hate the Dems. I tell my perspective of MeToo, and how that imho created enough anti-Dem energy to push Trump over the top. Polls won't tell you how the Dems got the rep of being the party run by women to cancel men, but I'm sure if we could cure that somehow, we could do everything we need to do to get American democracy working again. I did this in response to a Frum podcast where he and his guest conclude that the young folks are making a big mistake, they don't want the same old bullshit people coming back into power. Frum and Miller thought that the young men don't want was democracy, foolishly (I would agree) but there is real anger there, I know about it because I have it too. I still vote for Dems, but I also fear what happens if we snap back to the political correctness of
Kirsten Gillibrand.
#2022: "And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing."
#
Another point -- I don't think any of us realize what an un-democratic US will be like. When the things that make us furious these days are just the normal way of the USA. I got that from listening to a
New Yorker podcast yesterday about the Iranian perspective of what's happening (spoiler alert, since then the American war with Iran has started). They are so weary of the Islamic Revolution, they say and are right that Iran could be top 10 country, economically, except their government thinks this is the
Middle Ages. They want to live in modernity, and they're probably the only ones who think a war with the US is a good idea. Because living in an autorcacy is unthinkable for Americans. We don't really appreciate what we're becoming. If we did, we still could do something about it. For us there will be no USA to save our asses (not that the US can save the Iranians, clearly we can't).
#If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.
#
When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.
#
One of the items in
Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we
all do that always, voila! -- no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with apps that support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.
#Maybe it's time to give awards for most our admired standards-makers. I would start with Jon Postel and Steve Wozniak.
#I bet Jeopardy champions would make great software developers. Their intelligence, ability to stay calm and their incredible memory, all are needed to squeeze the last bits of performance from software.
#
- It's nice having Facebook around to show you your old posts. This one just came up and I thought it would be good to remind you all that I was once a young nerd creating Unix apps at UW-Madison.#
Me as a grad student, doing more or less the same I do as an old coot.
#
Also:
New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, the most successful protocol we have is podcasting. By design it was hard for silos to usurp. Now think about how you would repeat that pattern with text. I've been working on that for almost three years, and it works now. We'll be testing it soon on my blog, and then everyone's. This should be the grand slam home run of my career. That's how it feels to me now. And O'Brien tells some great stories including one about his father, who noted that Conan had found a way to get paid for his insanity.
#If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.
#
