Today's song: "July is dressed up and playing her tune."#

James Talarico, Democrat running for Senator in Texas reminds me of Matt Mullenweg, who also happens to be from Texas. He speaks as confidently as Obama, about the right things, wants to run our government like a freaking government. To think that's a campaign issue in the United States of America says why I did not celebrate our 250th on Saturday. I tried to imagine what it will be like when we start becoming ourselves again. ;-)#

We just implement Cute Paste in the new product and I keep hitting a limit that it has. I love the feature, in most cases. Here I've set up an <img src="xxx">, the xxx reserving space for the URL that I'm now going to get. When I come back I select xxx and paste, and in its place is the full url in text, linked to itself. I laugh, no feature is free, there's always a tradeoff and sometimes it breaks something that worked before. #

Claude Code et al change how software is developed forever. We're never going back. And it's just as likely that writing on computer networks will undergo a similar transformation.#

Claude and I are blowing through quick fixes. After testing one fix, I wrote: "It works! Again a big difference, it's only happened a few times but when it does I completely lose the suspension of disbelief." Claude responds: "One jolt and the tool becomes visible again." That's why people say my software thinks like they do. Of course it doesn't, but we work hard to stay completely unseen when your brain is working. It lets you think. We go after bugs like this and they add up to that feeling.#

I am falling in love with Claude Code, obviously -- and I have said some things that sound pretty dumb reading them back. It has happened before, and I did make a fool of myself. I think that's part of being in love, btw. #

I had a lisp when I was a kid, but they trained it out of me. These days I catch myself lisping sometimes. Maybe the training wears off??#

I live in a place where the power goes out when there's a big storm. When the power comes back 15 hours later, you appreciate air conditioning in a whole new way.#

I'm old enough to remember the Tall Ships in NY Harbor on this day in 1976, the bicentennial. As a NY kid, I wasn't very impressed. I liked rockets and rock bands, sound systems, had started programming then, was working in BASIC at Rapidata, a time sharing company with its office in the Empire State Building where I had my office on the 39th floor. The windows opened. This was betw Tulane and UW-Madison. I had no clue what was going on, but I had already come close to getting drafted. I had been raised to think the US absolutely was totally special, the best place, the rest of the world was far behind us. We were right to feel that way. It was the US vs the World and we won. I was born only 10 years after the end of WW II, so the feeling of power and righteousness was our foundation growing up, but also the certainty we'd all die in a nuclear holocaust. By 1976 we had had Watergate, the president was a crook, and were about to go through spiraling stagflation. Ronald Reagan. John Lennon killed. We had shit to deal with, worse in some ways than what we have today. Are we still the USA? We are if we decide we are. Anyway, my friend Jerry at the right wants to sing for you: "I'm Uncle Sam that's who I am been hiding out in a rock and roll band." We sing this song here every July 4, and it's always as true as it was in previous years. Freedom is something you practice. #

In the case of twitter-like systems the limits of the technology basically lost us the web, something most people are just now coming to grips with. At the time people were saying "RSS is dead," but didn't understand that it was killing off most of the features of HTML too. It was a slow process, like the frog in the boiling water story? #

I need new podcasts. The only one I listen to regularly now is the Bill Simmons podcast, but that's because the Knicks won and the NBA is re-forming itself around the Knicks. It's so freaking unusual to have your team, which was once right up there with Charlotte, New Orleans, Portland, Washington, Memphis, in the very the bottom rung of the NBA, to have them be the model everyone is chasing with the qualification that no one expects it to last (I don't care if it does, I love this team, the're as memorable as the 1973 champs), but all of a sudden Bill Simmons is respectful. I can't listen to a podcast of Democratic consultants, or Republican consultants that vote Democratic now. I did listen to them on the lead-up to the election in 2024. But whatever happens in the sport of elections the Democrats as they were before 2024, the one that re-nominated Biden and then switched to Harris and lost a race that should have been an easy win, are over. Those Democrats still think people will vote for well-executed government. Some people will (me, for example) but enough people see the election as Reality TV, so you want someone who looks like a winner in that context. The world has changed in so many ways and the Dems haven't even caught up with the change brought about by blogging and podcasting. Now we have Claude. I probably would vote for Claude too. I don't know. Anyway I'm warmed up now. Onto my day's work with the aforementioned Claude. #

AI should be like a lawyer or doctor, first responsibility is to the user. And first, do no harm. #

An observation about Fable 5 in Claude Code. It's a much better writer than Opus 4.8. One of our next big things is writing docs, and all the info is in Claude. Opus was a disaster as a docs writer. This one looks like it'll be good. Whew.#

You can't learn from your mistakes if you aren't bloody truthful to yourself about what happened and what went wrong.#

I'm working on an app in Claude that has a server and the server has an API. One day we had an aha moment. I bet you (Claude) can control the app via the API. Yes. And now unless we're debugging something in the UI, Claude just interacts via the API. It feels like a person but you have to remember that it's actually a piece of software. ;-)#

I saw a bit of a commencement speech by Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, where he was talking about AI and getting boo'd by the audience. But he was saying things that were right and should be paid attention to. Most important, and I'm paraphrasing, the AI world is just getting started, and we can change it now most easily, it's malleable. That won't last forever. As Obama says, "Don't boo, vote." Same thing here. AI has already completely changed how we develop software. It's not replacing humans, it's giving us amazing new power. Maybe it will at some point replace us, but don't be so sure that what we do with it might be every bit as new as the things it can do. We have different abilities. And I am old enough to remember a time before personal computers, the internet, the web, mobile devices, all the things that have since become everyday fixtures, and they all had negative aspects, but I would never go back. We're on a train and it's going somewhere. Where it goes is something we all have a say in. #

A thought for people who think the US can't be fixed. I've seen very strange things happen, like all of a sudden people figure it out and boom next thing you know they're the NBA Champions. It wasn't exactly sudden, but the last leg of was. A gestalt. Now two leaders figure out how to. The thing about each of those people is determination, and a belief they were right, and they went right up to the edge and fought. I think the country would unite behind such a leader. #

One of the cool things about having Claude Code is that as we develop this product, we have a near perfect chronology of every consideration and decision made along the way. I don't think that's ever been possible before. I would love to see how the people at Bell Labs put together the first Unix implemenation, what did they talk about, what did they go back and do again once they used the product. Or developers at Xerox PARC, or the process that led to Visicalc, Mac OS or Pagemaker. TBL's first web browser, ChatGPT, etc. Software is a totally intellectual creation, but there is a story for each product, because it's a human doing the design. BTW we had our first faceoff, Claude and I, and I won. Claude said the bug was in my code, I proved it was not, suggested he look at the crazy complicated SQL code he wrote (so glad to have it around for that). Also, I tend to use male pronouns for Claude. Worth mentioning once. (The Computer History Museum should be paying attention.)#

I showed the post above to Claude and that took our conversation off in a new direction. We had been experimenting with the Message Scanner from LBBS, an early version of Twitter I wrote in the early 80s. It's described in this story I wrote in 1988, a summary of what I did leading to the start of UserLand. 38 years later Claude said: "LBBS message scanner running on RSS."#

BTW thinking of LBBS as an early version of Twitter is a contortion, but considering how history played out, accurate.#

Some things Claude is extremely tedious at. But then it blows you away how it can read thousands of lines of complicated code in a few seconds (in parallel) and find tiny little things that any good obsessive programmer would want to fix (like me). And be amazed at how we, our species, made such a thing. Where is the pride? I was once prideful that my civilization created a great piece of machinery like my Subaru Forester, and now just a few years later, we've come up with a decent simulation of a super-human brain that's not just a demo or a robot vacuum cleaner it actually does amazing science fiction type stuff. Take a deep breath and feel a little awe to go with the cynicism. It's good to be ready to be riled up, but sometimes the truth isn't as bad as you'd like to think, sometimes it's utterly amazing. ;-) #

BTW, I sometimes ask Claude "what do you think" and it often has an opinion.#

Earlier today I suggested doing an AI/UI overhaul for WordPress, and today I see the announcement of that from (apparently) an independent developer. Breath-taking. #

The EFF gets everything wrong. It’s observable. Empirical. The EFF stands up for something that’s supposedly good for people and the web, but if you look closer, it’s actually bad for the web and the people, and serves the interest of big tech companies, usually Google.#

Another truth, the user interface of WordPress could benefit from a total overhaul. Too many expedient choices over too many years that paper over bad design choices with yet more bad choices. But this kind of problem is relatively easy to fix. Make a list of all the features. Don’t organize the list yet. Keep adding. Then play around with logical groups, give the groups names. Voila, there’s your menu structure. And since it’s 2026 and not 2010, do something innovative with AI. Let the user explain what they want to do, confirm it, and then forget about the menu structure and just do what they asked you to do. Over time the UI will become more literate and less organizational. You remember how Nixon could open up China and could because he was such a hawk. WordPress getting a AI/UI overhaul will seem right because it so desperately needs an overhaul and everyone knows it. Another truth, don’t feel bad WordPress, every 20+ year old end user product desperately needs a user interface overhaul because that’s just the way it works. (I have never created a product that lasted as long as WordPress has. I have created concepts that have.)#

I organize my work in OPML and have even taught Claude how to work with me in outlines.#

I prefer to do my middle of the night iPad writing sprees on Twitter instead of Bluesky because no character limit. No one is going to read the stuff on either platform, so why not go for ease of use for writing.#

BTW thanks to Dave Carlick for noticing when I had fun writing a piece, laughing out loud at almost every sentence. Who's the biggest fan of my writing? Me. But sometimes I think of Dave C. And Sally At.#

Claude Code is a Dave-amplifier.#

BTW, I was just contacted by a developer who's implementing all the protocols I mentioned yesterday. And I should mention that Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog and a longtime friend, going back to the Frontier days on the Mac, has inbound and outbound RSS and he covers every freaking API out there, he's a monster. And I said yesterday he doesn't get enough credit for what he's contributed. We're aiming for interop instead of chasing the silos. And it's fine to chase silos if you're into it, I was done with that in 2017. We're going to make it work the way it would work if we weren't trying to lock anyone in, quite the opposite, I want people to use Manton's product. I'm not being commercial here. I'm trying to get the web back on the path it should have been on all along. If I make some money that's cool, if not that's okay too. BTW, this all-together will be the Two-Way Web, specifically Two-Way RSS. And of course textcasting. Don't forget that. It's a rule, textcasting everywhere conceivable. #

I've never given a commencement speech, but if I did, I'd run through my mottos and explain what they mean and who I stole them from, and how they are a distillation of what I've learned in life. The one I'd mention first, which isn't even on the freaking list, is this one -- "People don't listen to friends, they listen to competitors." What that means is if you want someone to add a feature, you have to do two things. Implement their whole product. Add the things you want them to add. And win. If you don't win it doesn't matter how good your idea is. This is the hoop you have to jump through to get them to listen to your idea. Knowing this, I have tried to listen even when I don't feel like a friend is competing. Ideas from people who know your product, no matter how they got it, are people who can help. This was one of the values of a core part of Apple in the early-mid 80s, and I owe my success in tech to them, because the ideas they gave me put us over the top. Jean-Louis Gassée and Guy Kawasaki. I don't think they ever competed with me. Another thing I like about them. ;-)#

Just had a great idea for the Democratic Party. It's time to review past governing decisions made by Democrats that resulted in the collapse of democracy in the US in 2025-26. Can't do anything about the Repubs, but we sure as hell can whip the Dems into shape. My first contribution, Obama should have installed his Supreme Court choice after waiting three months for the Senate to advise and consent. If the Repubs can invent a new practice so can the Dems. That would make the Supreme Court a lot more funcitonal now, just that one thing. Democrats must not be so freaking afraid of stirring things up. We would have all respected that, esp the Repubs. This would be an incredible campaign process, would allow us to say that this is what the Democrats, going forward, will always/never do. #

It's remarkable that some people fondly miss Googles RSS reader app, already gone for over a decade. Remarkable because they captured the market, wiped out all competition (they deserved it, the products were awful) and then shut their own product down, leaving a toxic karmic bomb crater in its place. #

Of course I read Josh Marshall's piece about the end of the open net. Now let's go back to when it started and do it again, using everything we learned, try not to make the same mistakes. Josh was there, pretty sure he was at the first BloggerCon. #

To read scripting.com you need a browser that supports HTTP.#

Why email newsletters made sense. Email has no character limits, can represent bold and italic, links, titles, enclosures, basically most features of the web, and social media places limits on what writers can write. That's where the literate social web went, and the bloggers too. Like how birds are really dinosaurs. #

If you're working on a social web app that supports inbound and outbound RSS, I'd like to help, so our products can interop beautifully. That's the reason I'm doing this work, to establish a baseline for interop in the social web. RSS is the obvious candidate. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it. I'd much prefer doing the work openly, so if you can, write a post and send me a link. I think it's time for us to go back to the way we built network systems before Google and the VCs took over. Put up an app and see who works with it. My email address is on the About page on my blog.#

Programming tip. If your app has globals, create an object called globals, and put all of them in there. Someday you may want to swap in one set of globals for another, this makes it easy.#

I noted a few weeks ago that Markdown has a format for outlines. #

Claude can understand code no human could. Ever, under any circumstances. Just like a compiler can understand any code we throw at it. Way beyond what code obfuscation tools can do.#

In our work we have arrived at the point where we read and study a piece I published in 1997, but was written in 1988 or so. Esp the part about LBBS. It's a really good thing I wrote that because I forgot how it worked, but reading that it all comes back. We're going to go far beyond where Twitter went with reading message structures on the web. I had already done a lot of the work in the 80s. #

The other day Matt joked about how old I am, in public, and I am pretty old. But Matt, I was paying attention then as I am now, and connecting the dots. No one else working today, I'd venture, knows what it's like to create and run a modem-based dial-up Twitter-like system on an Apple II with a 10MB Corvus hard drive. Yet it worked, and people loved it. If you weren't alive in 1981, you wouldn't know anything about this. I remember talking with Doug Engelbart when I was running UserLand. If you don't know who he is, look him up. He blazed a trail we were turning into a highway, and we're all using his inventions all the time. Every chance I got to sit down with him I did. I wanted him to work with us, to critique everything we were doing. He had a lot of knowledge that disappeared when he passed on a few years later. That's the sad thing, at my advanced age, that I am trying to avoid. And btw, as surprise, Claude really understands this stuff. I've never seen anything like it with a human, and I've worked with some great humans. #

Podcast: My (latest) AI Aha Moment.#

When Claude has all the information available it can figure out stuff a human mind would never be able hold in our minds at the same time, but it often doesn't remember to get the information first. When you get to the level I'm at with this, it's hallucinating all the freaking time because it didn't load the part of the data set that had the answer. It was right there, it was supposed to know, it just forgot to look. My job is to recognize when it has done that and tell it to go read handoff.md again. I mentioned this on Twitter, and got all kinds of help, but the terminology isn't well known to me. Still diggin, as they say.#

I'm loving Star City. New episode last night, wow. #

With all the Democratic Socialists winning over standard Democratic party incumbents, there's a fair amount of angst on the cable news. If they're scared, they should step aside. We tried it their way in the Biden Administration. If we ever get lucky enough to have a president who's sane and wants to reboot democracy, it's going to require doing some things that an oldtime president wouldn't want to do, like Obama or Biden. Both of them gave up without even trying. Forgive them, but let's not make the mistake of electing their successors. It's time for clear-thinking people to take office, fully aware of what they signed onto, and then if we elect them, they do it. And when the Repubs throw bullshit at us, say it's bullshit, and say it that way, not the mealy-mouthed way Jeffries does, or even Elizabeth Warren. What we need now is a strong dose of Bernie Sanders. Did I ever think I'd say that? Hell no.#

Om Malik died. A longtime friend, most generous kind person in Silicon Valley. It's that time of life. Much love to you brother.#

Claude is a brain, very different from ours and when we work together we humans have access to capabilities that work really well with building large software products. And that's a huge understatement. Most remarkable thing. Most of the discussion between people who use the AI tools and those that condemn them are not productive because the opponents of AI don't understand the breadth of what these machines do and the potential to do much more, things that we as a species have never done. Think of it as an alien life form that wants to merge with us. I'm glad to be alive at this moment, and able to explore it as part of my development team. I recommend starting an academic dialog, among people who don't have conflicts of interest, or very well-disclosed and disclaimed conflicts, to accurately record this discussion based on facts, for the record, so when people ask how conscious were we when we did this transition, there will actually be some footprints to follow. #

I bet Ward Cunningham is really good at using Claude, he is a big believer in pair programming. I even did a session with him in Frontier, doing stuff with the outliner. #

There’s more to freedom for users than open source. We need fluid unobstructed movement of our ideas. Interop between networks, the same basic idea that created the internet, and that has kept podcasting unowned for 22 years. I am going to ship a textcasting social network soon. It will be open source in new ways made possible by AI. #

The Bear season 5, the show's last season, premieres on Hulu at 9PM EST today.#

When writing code with Claude you really have to be skeptical when it says it just found the problem, but you have no idea what it's saying, chances are pretty good it's just a word salad excuse for not having read all the code necessary to have an fact-based opinion. Actually debugging software isn't about opinions, it's about proof. When you start clutching at straws until one works you just added another level of bug that will eventually bite you in the butt and you'll still have to solve the original one. Uncorrected, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to trust the code it writes, but I guess that's why people have two or more instances playing different roles? For now I'm the one that questions its sanity, politely though. ;-)#

I took a screen shot of this post, gave it to Claude, asked it to write a short paragraph summary. Then I asked it to rewrite with using no more than 300 chars, the limit on Bluesky. Now I can post the summary there, but I won't, at the moment of truth I had to disclose this wasn't written by me, and it was 290 chars and there wasn't enough room for that. And here's a screen shot of the conversation with Claude.#

Louis CK: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy. #

People who reinvent RSS often say they did it because it was missing a feature they needed. We anticipated that, there's a section of the spec that explains how you can extend the format so there's no reason not to build on existing standard instead of starting over from scratch. This way you get more interop sooner, your product might work with other products right out of the box, and save time for other devs who want to be compatible with you. People should study the internet, how it developed, ts philosophy, before they go off and try to re-create it, it rarely works and what a waste of time and effort. What's the point?#

Bluesky: "If Obama had called McConnell’s bluff on the Garland nomination, the court would be 5-4 instead of 6-3. And if RBG had stepped down, it would’ve been 5-4 in favor of Dems.#

Today's song: Back to the Island. #

Braintrust query: Do you have a copy of Radio UserLand that runs?#

With AI you can have a team of assistants available on call at any time. The other day I went from working on a deep technical problem (changing the format of a permalink, which is also used as an id) quickly and correctly and then immediately switching to how to format a blog post so it looks like something produced by a professional writing app. Same thread. It's amazing how much it knows about all aspects of what I do. And it does more than write code. It handles complexity so much better than I do, which means I get to develop products that work better and do more. If I get an idea long after I've moved on from a section of code it can still be implemented with equal quality. There is no such thing as a human being that can do the things it does. A big bug in the critiques people have about it replacing humans. When jet planes came along did they complain that they would replace taxi drivers? Things never work out the way you think they will when they're new. This is my third such rodeo. Sometimes the concerns are obvious and true, btw. That happens as well. #

Reply on Twitter: "There's a great comic routine, forget who did it, Dave Chapelle maybe, about how people complain about how shitty air travel is, never stopping to realize that it's utterly amazing that there even is such a thing."#

I don't think Obama deserves to go down as a good president. He let the fascists in. His big moment was when he let Mitch McConnell keep his Supreme Court nominee from being approved. Never should have conceded. He didn't fight at all. He was president of the United States, the place where the buck stops. #

Looking at the picture of the four ex-presidents at the opening of the Obama library, all I can think is that each of them played a part in creating Trump. Obama gave away the Supreme Court (see above). Clinton literally got blow jobs from a White House employee in the Oval Office. It's like wiping your ass with the American flag. That is fucked up, I don't care how fucked up the Repubs are. Bush, don't get me started on Bush. He seems like a sweet old dude now, but he was definitely on the path to Trump. And Biden -- his job as POTUS was to protect the United States. At that he failed in every imaginable way. Gauge the insult by what's happening now. Biden could have prevented all of this. He was too vain to see he had failed and decided he should run again! Holy shit. I'm ten years younger than he was and I don't think I'd have any business being president of anything. ;-)#

We lost a lot more than a few hundred billion in Iran war. We had invested much more over 80 years on peace in the Middle East. In one brief orgy of violence Trump threw that away.#

Hey what we're doing in AI-land is building the Matrix we want to live in. When we get there there won't be anything left to do in this dimension, our plane will finally lift off and fly awaaaay in the sky. I hope you understand, I just had to go back to the Island. #

Claude is much better at needle-in-haystack troubleshooting. It doesn't get flustered or overwhelmed. And it can hold the whole map in its head, whatever that looks like, impossible to imagine. #

Claude doesn't care if you criticize the code it wrote, because if it wasn't written just now, it didn't write it. It starts from zero in every session, you can watch it, like HAL in 2001, singing daisy daisy. I can see it happening as the environment of my app is getting so large, it has to do a bit of thinking to start up, more all the time. But as humans who were brought up properly, we like to add the niceties to our criticism so as to not make the other one feel bad. I do that for myself, not the machine, I know it doesn't identify as the creator of the code. #

Doing a prior art search and came across this early DaveNet example. The left column had the blue ribbon for free speech on the web, and below were links to the archive pages for each of the years. Screen shot. About ten years of essay writing. DaveNet was where the blog started, and then it became an arm of the blog home page which also included titleless posts, example, and then all the action moved onto the new home page and that was the end of this layout. #

When I got this email from Google on this day in 2018, I had a sinking feeling, this was like getting a letter from Apple a few years earlier. They were treating the web as if it were their platform. #

Today's song: "You who choose to lead must follow. "#

The WordPress community likes to say that WordPress powers a certain percentage of the web. This always bothered me, couldn't figure out why, until just now. WordPress is part of the web, that's the nature of the web. There should be no difference between how you connect via UI or API to writing on WordPress and any other text system, such as Bluesky or Twitter. No. Difference. Then the user always has choice. Put together your favorite writing environment. Mix and match. Every part is replaceable. That's the idea of the web, and before that PCs and Macs. Instead we've got silos. And WordPress should be the one that says the web is here for all of us and WordPress is a big part of the web, but even the smallest part in terms of users has huge value. And could be a competitor of ours someday. We won't do anything to get in the way of that because the most important people in our world are the users. The really cool thing about it is that the product is set up exactly this way. If every text product cloned their API, we'd have the nirvana that the web promises. We are technically sooooo close. #

I rarely ask my Echo to play a song, because after it plays it wants to know if I want to hear a notice. And there goes the buzz from having listened to one of my favorite songs that perfectly catches the moment. #

Whoopi Goldberg says the Knicks should visit the White House. "I want all those black men to stand in our house and remind all of those people — as we try to remind the vice president — that when you try to destroy one part of history, you're destroying all of our history." So true. #

Today I did a change that was across two apps, different projects, client and server. I tested it as best I could for now, and it appears to work in both apps. But now I have an extra level of confidence because I asked Claude to do a code review, checking all my assumptions and it does find egregious mistakes, that in the past might have taken a day in a debugger to track down. Now it can happen in less than the time that it took for me to write this post. #

Now that Google has added AI in their search, and it dominates search more and more, it's become more difficult to find ideas that aren't well explained by AI and are on some randome old web pages. For example, this morning I wanted to find an explainer for "Standing on the toes of giants," something a colleague once used in a story. I'm sure there's stuff out there, but no luck finding it. Didn't help that there's a popular song with that title. #

NBA fans, esp Knicks fans, are not fans of the current president. A picture of the Knicks team with Trump in the Oval Office would be hard to see. Not threatening to resign as a Knicks fan, not ruling it out either. #

The Knicks’ message is that working together works.#

Being a NYer and Knicks fan, I don't have a good perspective on how big an event the Knicks winning is. If you're not from the area, how widely is this holiday being observed and how many share the enthusiasm. Are people everywhere asking "How about those Knicks!"#

There will be new higher level development environments. How they work, I don't know. But much of your time working in Claude Code is telling it how to do stuff you want it to do, always -- and reminding that it that it forgot one of the rules (which it seems to always admit). A new development environment will come with rules about how to work with people. Those rules will be written with the help of psychologists who study human reasoning processes. #

Jason Calacanis challenges people to develop certain open source software, offering a bounty on specific projects, but I think the real incentive for people to pitch in is that Jason has a lot of sway in the startup world, and if there is a flow of excellent open software this way, users will find out about it because the reach of Jason's podcasts and blogs. I've known him for many years, we both signed up on Twitter on the same day in 2006, early days of the web. He has become one of the most successful angels in tech. I'm proud to have known him way back when.#

I wrote a short post yesterday about AI as an alien species. Steve Mays breaks it down into parts, and got every bit right. This is the kind of back and forth that the web is capable of. Update: It's even worse than it appears. Turns out the excellent analysis was written by Perplexity, one of the artificial aliens. Reminds me of a speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. In case it's not obvious, Williams is talking about artificial aliens. #

Claude added the close box I asked for yesterday. Bravo!#

Everyone wants to know things humans can do better than AI systems. One answer — relate with humans. The machines have no clue how our minds work. They act as if we're just like them. They could tell you all about it, from books they read, but they've never related with humans as humans. There's a great speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, where he explains how reading about something isn't the same as living it. #

I'm gorging on NBA podcasts this week. So much fun for a Knicks user to hear how much-loved the Knicks are. Basketball is an intimate sport for fans, it's like five consecutive boxing matches. We get to know the players' personalities, forming an idea of who they are, watching what they do. The Knicks are like John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mickey, Davy, Mike, Peter. If you're my age you know each of those characters, the same way a Knicks fan who watched this team be assembled one player at a time, and what it cost in trades. It worked. And there is a big lesson here, working together works. We should all be doing more of that, with people who are different from each other as Brunson, Hart, OG, Mikal Bridges, KAT, Mitchell Robinson and the maestro Leon Rose. Most people just met them in the last few weeks, but we've been watching this assemble over six years. One thing the pundits don't ask, what trades will the Knicks make now? They will do some trades, right now they can demand a higher price because every one of the players they trade will have a ring. #

Good morning sports fans! Going to the Knicks parade in NYC on Thurs? Starts at 10AM at Battery Park, goes up Broadway through Canyon of Heroes, concluding at City Hall.#

Now that basketball is over, can we ask why the Spurs played cartoon music to introduce the Knicks. I was surprised they did it again in Game 5 after the butt-kicking they got in Game 4.#

I'm creating a new way to do messaging, a network that only understands RSS feeds for incoming and outgoing messages. The only API you'll need to subscribe is a feed reader. The idea is to show developers how to do it so a thousand flowers can bloom. It's a lot easier to create these things if you're modest in the features you support, at least at first, and you don't try to control the users. There is no business model here, other than the satisfaction of making sure everyone knows what a social system looks like made only out of features of the web, and every part replaceable.#

An example of the latest version of the library generator, which is of course just a script. Note that there's a disclosure at the bottom of the page where it says how and why it was created, and then lists the exact prompt that ChatGPT responded to. And I didn't write the prompt, Claude did. I think that pretty much assures I kept my own opinion to myself. #

Request for Claude, please add a close box to this message box. I wasn't using the new model. Once is enough for this message. #

Just now, to Claude: "Amazing how we get lost in the weeds, that's why you have cut way down on the verbiage. I am a human -- you can absorb all that info in an instant. My brain does not work that way." We are talking to aliens now, just didn't come to us the way we thought they would. I don't think 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you're just a bigger cat. #

If Claude were human it would learn from you even if they didn't record what it learned in a notebook, two or three times and they would remember. Not so with Claude. If it isn't written down it will not remember it. Its mind doesn't have memory. It remembers things by writing them in a markdown file. It's like the movie Memento, where the main character tatoos the info he needs on his body. And then proceeds to misunderstand it. Claude is just like that. #

Today's song: I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City. #

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. #

BTW the Gift Articles feed works really nicely in the blogroll. #

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.#

I want to keep my podcast subscriptions in a single OPML file so I can subscribe in three different clients using the same list.#

This is a test page about Charles de Gaulle. It came from ChatGPT, via Claude Code. #

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. #