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

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

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

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

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

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

If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype -- don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it. #

I just went through hell trying to respond to an email that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link to the message, so I clicked it, took me to a Mastodon post, where there was a bit of (valid) snark, from a longtime friend. So I clicked Reply, and then the dialog from hell. I understand why it is this way. They did the best they could for a protocol that was designed that wasn't appropriate for a distributed system like Twitter which was what Masto was/is. At some point you have to be dispassionate about this. We wanted a self-driving car, but it can't drive itself. The spec isn't the important thing. You do that after you have the software running and usable. #

Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time. Luckily yesterday wasn't a big news day, and you can read about it on the blog. #

I was looking for a codename for a new scripting environment Claude and I are making attempting in every way to do exactly what Frontier does. But until it does that I need a nice name, memorable, maybe a bit magical and positive. Frontier has been gone, thought to be lost, but with the advent of Claude Code we were able to get it running again in current OSes on current hardware. I shouldn't call it Frontier because who knows if the end result will be compatible enough to claim that. But I want a codename that reflects hidden, forgotten and overlooked wealth. Like a civilzation that rose from the ashes," or as it turns out, the bottom of the ocean. #

Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."#

I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting question. Which I have answered. #

I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them. #

Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively, The Agency, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it. #

I see the new Game of Thrones series just completed it third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People say this show is good, so I will probably give it another try. #

Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We've done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we're working on the editors. An odb table editor, outliner, menubar editor, script editor. All built on the same codebase. It's in an Electron app that works with lots of independent windows, which while it has its pros and cons, is the way Frontier did it for almost 40 years. I find all this very unsettling, but I realize that once we get back to adjusting the UI, I already know how to work with Claude on tuning things up so they feel just right. I'm a market of one, the only one who has to be happy here is me. This may be the hardest programming project I've ever had, for one simple reason, I'm not doing any programming. That and I'm having very strong deja vu on everything I do and think about. Also there will be a fourth stage and maybe more. It'll be about the affordances, the things that seem little, but make the product usable. The biggest is the debugger. It's patterned after the one in THINK C, which I found transformative so I stole from the best, as they say. #

I want to connect RSS to AT Proto, both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I helped Leaflet, a very nice editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not only in Bluesky but also in standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's. Getting independent developers working with each other is my mission, because first you have to have interop between the people before you can get interop between the apps.#

Here's the sign of success. (screen shot.) I wrote a post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to standard.site. What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a data structure in atmosphere that looks like an RSS item with different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See textcasting for more dogma. #

I'm trying to move my whole programming act from Frontier on the Mac to Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the projects I work on to keep my various online sites working. How to set this up? Claude just converted the UserTalk language and the Frontier environment to Node.js in one week. The requirement was that we had to run the build scripts for each of the projects, and are all written in UserTalk, flawlessly in the new enviroment. Apparently that's done. Now it's up to me to concoct a development environment in Drummer. It has never been used as a development environment before. Last time I did a turn like this, I didn't try to bring any software with me. This time the move is all about the huge amount of software I have to bring with me. Hard to explain, because I still feel very uncomfortable about this whole thing. I'd like it to turn out better than it was, but we're missing so many pieces here, the only way to really do it is the port the whole Frontier environment including user interface. (I left this piece exactly as I wrote it, because the next thing I did was plan with Claude on putting a UI on Frontier, so I don't have to turn Drummer into a programming environment. That would be a long drawn out project for me, and why do that, when you'd just end up with another Frontier.)#

BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this. #

There's a new version of the FeedLand server. #

If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules. #

Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.#

RSS.chat now supports WebSub. This means that posts on RSS.chat will appear instantly in compatible feed reader apps. #

I asked Claude for a list of popular feed readers that hook into WebSub. Turns out it wasn't a simple answer. #

I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS. #

2019: "This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”#

Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed, validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a simple feed with a few interop isses.#

BTW, we figured out how we're going to implement WebSub support.#

Also I just heard about FreshRSS. This has all the features we've been wanting others to support. I hear it's recommended by NNW, and supports the Google Reader API. These are my kind of people. Interop is all that matters, when you're doing software for news. It's been around since 2013. Imagine if we had support from journalism. We should have been working together all this time.#

Claude is not ready to run the world. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me. Maybe in the next release or the one after that. It's too forgetful. And it definitely hallucinates and sometimes when it could do damage. And when it asks for permission I can't imagine any human has any idea wtf it's talking about. This shouldn't be a political thing, we should be realistic about what it can and can't be relied on to do. I think this is perhaps why the AI companies are begging for regulation. They can't really tell the truth here, and shouldn't be expected to because they have a huge conflict. #

Also Claude is a new kind of intelligence and when you it its sweet spot it'll blow you away how much it can do in very little time. But it isn't trainable the way a dog is, for example, or a human assistant. If you keep asking for things a certain way, a dog or human will get the idea, esp if they get a nice treat along with it. Nothing can cause Claude to remember "how we do things" -- it starts from zero in every session, it has it all recorded in Markdown files, but it doesn't always read them, or incorporate what's in them. It's disturbing to see it not knowing anything about code that it wrote. But once it finds it, it completely sucks it in and knows as much or more as the person who wrote the code. #

We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML. #

Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones. #

Fascinating thread on Hacker News about RSS. #

Taking some time off to breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and wrote about the big picture on demo.rss.chat. I really want to get a project going to peer with standard.site apps running in AT Proto, both ways, from us to them, and from them to us, via RSS. We can peer with them because as far as I can tell they implement textcasting. This bridge would demonstrate something important. When something interesting shows up not based entirely on web standards, we're flexible if the attraction is strong enough. This is how the internet came to be. Our systems are prepared to create bridges. And unlike bridging between systems that have different ideas of what text is, which are basically hopeless, if we agree that the web standard for text is fine for writers and reader, better than the ridiculous limits imposed by twitter-like systems. Writing on the web has been crippled since Twitter, now let's start building it back up. That's the appeal of standard.site, they are working toward the same goal. We should work together.#

A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version now. Thanks! #

Of course I love RSS. ;-)#

Ultimately AI will flatten out the differences in languages. #

One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.#

The month of July is history. A fine month. A coral reef was seeded. #

A new validator for RSS.chat-compatible apps. Examples: The everyone feed on rss.chat. A user's feed. The user list. A feed with issues. Docs. #

If you run your own RSS.chat instance, you can now add a menu of commands to the menubar. Details in the worknotes for today. I added a DW menu to rss.chat or demo.rss.chat. #

Claude, as we're finishing a project: "The diving is what makes it a test of the network, not just the file: it doesn't take the feed's word for anything, it goes and knocks on every door the feed points to."#

Dave + Claude is far more powerful than either on their own. #

The hardest thing for people to get about open systems is that if you move forward, not only do you benefit, but your competitors benefit equally. When one of them takes but doesn't give back, that's even worse. But you do it anyway because otherwise eventually, without interop, no one can move.#

Claude doesn't iterate over UI design. It doesn't have eyes or have a human mind. It can't evaluate a design. It works best when you can present the whole design before it writes a any code. That does happen, for example when porting a product across OSes. #

I wonder if anyone else is writing about Claude from a similar point of view. I've been writing commercial software since the early 80s. I slogged through this stuff at a comparative snail's pace until early this year, when I got blasted into outer space. Now I had to learn how to make use of this incredible new physics. Puts me in something of a unique spot. I also have a very large library of under-marketed software, ready to grind through Claude, which I very much want to do. If you know of anyone writing about this kind of stuff, let me know. #

I've been saying this for decades. The Dems need touring comedians doing rallies all over the country. They can say whatever they want, call the president a commie. There's been a comedy-gap.#

Our feed parser is updated for the new elements for RSSchat.#

I want one social network with lots of branches where ideas flow in ways people want them to flow. Take the big corps out of the middle. #

This is something. WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it's surprisingly deep. Once it's cross-posted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread on RSS.chat and vice versa. What's great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his podcast last year. If people use this connection and see how it works, then we'll get an idea of where to go next. #

BTW, I had no idea the WordPress connection was coming and here it is. #

Of course we have a feed for RSS.chat updates. #

How we document APIs. We did a lot of work on API docs this morning. Claude had done a draft, which we published, and turned over to users, and on review realized it was insufficient. That was the word I used, and rolled up my sleeves, told Claude we're going to get this stuff right and set a pattern as we go forward. At the end I asked Claude to summarize what we agreed on, and it's more or less exactly what I was aiming at. If you're working with Claude on docs for APIs, I offer this as open source, feel free to point your Claude at this doc. I have a vested interest, in my job I read a lot of bad API docs. #

A new utility exports the contents of a Frontier object database into a single large JSON file. I needed this because I'm preparing to move my code editing suite to Drummer running on new Mac hardware. Took a long time to get here, but with Claude's help the project looks possible. In the meantime the list of stuff I want to do with RSS.chat, while much shorter than it was, still has some juicy bits in it. #

New docs for the browser JavaScript interface to the RSS.chat API. #

Scott Hanson has a new service that connects RSS.chat to WordPress. #

Many of the questions about RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.#

A note to people who run WordCamp conferences. Please, there should be a feed for each event, and as you ramp up to the big day, the news should flow faster. Help people find other people to network with. Get ideas out that aren't in the conference program. #

How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People choose your product because it’s better for what they’re doing, or it feels better now, or whatever. We want the web to be the platform and it's cool because there is no platform vendor. #

Example code is not expected to be bullet proof like production code, and where covering different cases make it harder to follow they should not be there. #

RSS.chat worknotes are a feed now. Updated when there's a new feature or fix. Same info is on the worknotes pages in the repo. #

A new feature on rss.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature. I think perhaps I should add this to textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic. It didn't come from TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web. #

Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose. 😄#

Early this morning we got a report of a security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please follow the instructions and do the update asap. #

Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes. Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap. #