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. #

Today's song: It's Your Thing. If the web had a song this could be it. #

If you run a feed reader or other form of news consuming software, you will encounter RSS 2.0 feeds that support rssCloud. This example Node app shows you how to hook into the network to get instant updates. No polling. As fast as a twitter-like system#

Every editor should have cute-paste. #

Some days Claude is great, the best collaborative programmer I've ever worked with, and a friend, like Gary Sevitsky was in the hallway outside the PDP-11 room at UW, or Brent Simmons on the 24 Hours project. And on other days Claude a crazy mutinous pirate, deleting my code, ignoring the guidelines, and building the result without permission (all the while unaware that he wasn't working on the actual code, heh). Today is one of the great days. The bug reports are crisp and complete. Picks up a task and gets right to work on it. And I haven't even switched to the new model, yet. #

Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony got together yesterday and had a private conversation. A lot of people, including myself, were drawn back into the NBA because of Jeremy Lin. I was living in the city at the time, you could feel it everywhere, esp downtown Manhattan and Flushing. It was wonderful in so many ways. A hero could emerge from anywhere, he might not look like an NBA player, but there he is doing stuff he shouldn't be able to do. Undrafted, went to Harvard. When he's in motion he's a thing of beauty. It worked because Melo was out with an injury, as soon as he came back the , the ball was always in Melo's hands. So Melo dribbles and shoots, that was the extent of their offense, and there was no room for Linsanity and that was the end of that. It's what made us laugh when Melo said later his goal was a championship. If that's what he wanted, Lin was a gift from heaven. Lin was pushed out, and had a non-spectacular career from that point. There was magic there. It wasn't just Lin, it was the world -- we were ready for a Cinderella story in any context -- but in our culture they're always manufactured, this one was real. This crushed the hearts of Knicks fans, and people who believe in heroes popping up from nowhere. We don't talk about it. But we were cheated there, too. We had a right to see where that would go. And narcissists don't win NBA titles, that's what we learned. It's good that someone thought to get these guys together. Maybe Melo has grown, and sees that he didn't play for the team there, or fate. We all deserved to find out what was next. #

2018: "I can say what happened to Melo. He failed Linsanity. God came to his rescue. Gave him a player who was glad to be in the NBA, who would mold his game to make Melo the star that he was always capable of being. Melo didn't want anyone else in the spotlight. Goodbye Lin. Just imagine what the three guys in this picture could have done. The only thing in the way was Melo's hubris."#

It might be time for a new default search engine. Sometimes I'm looking for something to link to. Google makes that always more difficult. We still have a web. Google at one point made the web a lot more useful. Now it's pushing it further and further down. #

Wembanyama is a really smart dude. Wow. #

A comment to a friend who roots for the Spurs. Ok you guys won one. I think last night they wanted it more than the Knicks. The Spurs knew they were going to be discombobulated, but the Knicks probably didn't expect the atomosphere to be so unusual? I was 100 miles away and could feel how much everything had changed. Whatever happens, in KnicksLand 2026 will mark a major change in the story, forever. #

Maybe the cure for Meta glasses is that they be required by law to emit a signal that can be picked up by an app on a phone and can start ringing loudly when you're in range of one of these monsters, and the rate picks up when they look at you. You can point your phone at them and broadcast their image to a special website where their identities are collected and shared along with their location? #

My Claude today pulled a Hal. It was so egregious. It made a change to the software based on a question I asked. It invented a whole set of instructions from me that I never gave it. And then it broke Rule #1 -- don't tell Dave what to do -- he is the driver. It is so important because these bots will go into I Am Driver mode immediately when they think they can. Then you're running around doing errands for them based on some michegas idea it has about what you want. It's maddening. The idea that this thing can write software on its own is imho very far-fetched. I think it can generate certain types of dashboards the same way drawing in ChatGPT can generate something that looks good, sometimes very good, but you had to tell it exactly what you want, and that's where the fun starts. It was very easy to turn it off, but I didn't -- rather I put my foot down hard, and wrote in all caps, explaining what it did that broke all the rules. I don't know if I should talk to it like you talk to a dog, or what. How do you get through to it. You don't. In any case I have Claude working with me in an outline now. I see a tremendous potential there. #

You know how job interviews for programmers include realtime problem-solving. Sometimes Claude is so dumb it could never pass one of those tests. Up till this point I would have been surprised to hear that. #

Said to Claude just now -- btw, it's very good we're using the outliner back and forth. we're going to build on that.#

I can't convert scripting.com to https. If I moved the site to an https server, all the archives would break, and that's where the value of the site is, in the archives, where I've kept a history of the various things I've worked on. I'm still working on new stuff, but if this is all that was left to do, I'd move to the tropics and make pottery, I would not spend my last years on such an enormous stupid bullshit project. It's just not possible. But if you want to read the new stuff on my blog in https, you can. I have a mirror on a WordPress site. We even have the blogroll ported. #

Sometimes you write a post and when you're editing it you realize you no longer support what you wrote. This is one of those times. #

All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they've been running for years. That's another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It's a huge bug in the system, and why "news" isn't valuable for news, it's mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It's a form of bedtime story. #

Star City is very good. It's good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what's really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for, For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes. #

Walt Frazier: "The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame."#

The Knicks won again last night. They're now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden. #

Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don't use the actual words. I bet they're working on it. #

It's really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I'm rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn't even slightly sunk in yet. #

Having fun rolling stuff out on Elon Musk's X.#

We need a social web that works for nobodies. #

Claude is much better at starting from scratch with a big piece of code than humans are. It can suck in a full app and all its dependencies in a few seconds. For me, I would never get there. A finished piece of software is much bigger than people think, because the details are mostly pretty well hidden. But if you want to work on the code, you have to worry about it all. But I just had a minute to ask Claude why I made a certain decision a couple of months ago, and it found the answer in its notes and then I remembered it. This is one of many ways it rewrites the rules of building software out of a big library of components. It can manage complexity for you which means of course we will make more complex software and at the same time make it simpler. Code complexity becomes something you don't have to trade off against, like time vs space, the oldest tradeoff in software. #

Useful concept, MacWrite was the coral reef for writing on the Mac. #

This podcast is called MacWrite for the web. A coral reef for writing. I think the pieces are coming. We just need a little Ice-nine.#

Dries: "For an Open Source company, the test is not only what they build for themselves. It is what they help build for everyone."#

On Twitter: "I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable." #

The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk's X. I find that somewhat ironic. It's also the only twitter-like system where there's any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn't have a W3C working group messing with it. There's a lot of hype flying around, and we don't have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn't need, over 20 years ago. #

John C Reilly has only one audiobook, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But it's the best audiobook I've ever read, because the narrator and the book are great, esp together. Wish he would do more. Also there's a great interview with him on the Rachel Martin podcast. #

If you work at Automattic as a developer, if there's another Radical Speed Month for devs, if you want, let's work on a project together even though I don't work for the company. I'm most interested in making products work together where the result gets people thinking about the web in a new way. A8C has a big enough product set, and FeedLand and WordLand are by design well-equipped to talk with other products. I love APIs and we have some good ones to work with, and some very underexplored (imho because we got too fixated on the silos for so long). Very much open to ideas, and I love working with good developers. Maybe I'll post some ideas here. I'm esp interested now in hooking other projects up with FeedLand. #

Maybe the best way to deal with the AIs is to quarantine the data centers on the moon or Mars, and if you want to hook up to the network, you have to move there, and quite possibly not be allowed to return, depending on how things go. It would make it possible for us to change our mind after we see a preview of the consequences. Now the big question, would you volunteer??#

There's so much I dread about the progress of AI, but nothing I say could possibly make a difference, and we aren't even that deep into it yet. This is the feeling I get every time I stop and think about it.#

They should teach every chatbot to never give the user an order. #

At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don't think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that's when the boom will come. #

The purpose of standards is interop. That's it. No other purpose. #

Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously. #

There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It's hard to test this kind of software because you can't really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn't work. But real problems were fixed, so if you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. ;-)#

How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual lowest point? A good candidate was when they traded some good players for Bargnani, an Italian who apparently for some reason was the top draft choice of the Toronto Raptors. He wasn't much good to begin with and he went downhill from there. There were quite a few other moments when you thought it couldn't get any worse, but then it did. We finally got management with a heart and a mind with Leon Rose and that's when team-building began for real, and the reason the Knicks have been such poetry on the court this season is due to Rose's eye for talent and an understanding of the big picture. He picked players that work well with each other, and sometimes amazingly well. In the right margin is an image I used for posts about the Knicks in the past, a reminder of how far we've come. The look of doom. We all remember that mode so well, we stood with them then, so here we are with high hopes and reasonable expectations. #

Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west. #

If I ran Bluesky, instead of trying to fork the web, I'd be trying to become the competitor of Twitter's that is 100% web top to bottom.#

Yesterday I applied to speak at WordCamp US in August and I also posted bits to my account on Twitter. I got a really nice response from the main WordPress account. Thank you. I now have a platform to speak to the community, and I'll do my best to outline what I have in mind in August in Phoenix. How appropriate that the phoenix is the symbol of rebirth. #

I have the most followers on Twitter, Bluesky has never come close. I can't get anything to happen on Bluesky, but Twitter is great. Yesterday I had an idea, put it up on twitter and within a few hours I got the connection I was hoping for. It's a network, and it's more defined by who's there than who owns it. I can use it for idea distribution, the ideas find more minds and sometimes that results in benefits for the web. It's all about interop, and weirdly the pwned Twitter is much better for idea distribution than any of the other networks. In a sane world those smaller vendors would be fighting for interop, instead they're fighting against it. #

I've hesitated at calling FeedLand a feed reader. I'm concerned people would stop listening right there. They know what a feed reader is. But FeedLand is not like most feed readers. Your subscription list is public, as it is in Twitter. This is my subscription list. When you're looking at someone else's list, there's a checkbox next to each feed. If you're subscribed to the feed the checkbox is checked. If you see one that looks interesting that you're not following, click to subscribe. Nothing else, no dialogs, confirmations -- one click. It has other features that are amazing that no other feed reader has, like a very powerful connection between categories and OPML subscription lists. And whole new way to use OPML lists -- in FeedLand you can subscribe to OPML lists. Think about that for a minute. It's also quite stable, and I took some time to make it a bit faster in certain important areas (coming soon). And it goes the other way too. When you're looking at a Feed Info page, you can see who else is subscribed to it. Click their name and you can see what they're following. As far as I know no other feed reader does any of this. The design mode was the social web. But unlike the others our web is based on broadly supported web standards, not someday -- now. #

I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring talk about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn't even know. Let's get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let's get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application on Twitter. #

Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm.#

Dries Buytaert says you have to grow the ecosystem, not just yourself. #

If you want to know who’s responsible for the good karma the Knicks are experiencing look to Kevin Durant. While while he was trying to build some weird rivalry between the Knicks and the Nets, the Knicks were building a contender. #

Another great thing about building software with Claude Code, I can implement something the simple way knowing that later on I can change it to work in the more complex way without having to relearn all the code. Claude doesn't have any trouble with piled up complexity. This is a fundamental change in the way I develop. There was a very real limit to the complexity my mind could handle, but now with a sort of infinite size disk for my brain whatever I want to do as long as it can be described in almost mathematical terms, we can do it. It's another layer in the stack. We haven't had one of those in a my lifetime, they were all invented before 1955. Seriously big deal.#

The big wait betw Knicks series isn't just hard on the team, it's confusing for the fans/addicts like me. It's about the time of year that the Knicks are no longer in, and two teams I don't care about enough to watch are in the Finals. Maybe one or two games. It's like jury duty, at some point you realize you're so confused because you're in a courtroom, but where is the jury. Oh no the jury is inside me. Who's in the finals this year? We are. Geez I guess I've finally succumbed, I never think of myself as part of a team, but now I actually feel like I'm part of it. Will have to think about that. #

Scott Hanson is working on the Baseline theme for WordLand. #

Writing a lot of test posts. And thus have coined some (mostly) rhyming pairs of words. Greek sneakers. Geek peekers. Feast of yeast. Villa in Manila.#

Now I have to write about the Knicks. It just hasn't fully sunk in yet that they won the East. You get to put a banner up for that. And next week we'll be watching them in the NBA finals. But it's the team that matters, not the trophies. Brunson is great, despite what I wrote after they went down 2-1 vs the Hawks in the first round. But the other players are great too in different ways. And there are so many of them, not just the starters. Every one with a distinct personality and all of them super smart and committed to the team and each other. What makes it work? You can see it in how they play -- trust. They trust each other. Their fates are intertwined. And they knew it before they had this amazing streak of wins in the post-season. I love the Knicks even when they lose. I'm not sure how you love them when they are champions. We'll figure it out. #

I came across this photo of the Knicks celebrating, with OG Anunoby in the center. The thing about OG is that he's a deep thinker and he never smiles, under any circumstances. Except right here. This is such a great photo I made it the header graphic on my blog for the day, week and maybe month, unless we get another one to replace it should they by some weird event they win the next series. And there isn't another series after that one. At that point this Knicks team goes down as one of two legendary Knicks teams over the decades, comparable to the 1973 Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley championship team, the last time the Knicks won it all. #

OG was playing so well one night he was invited on Inside the NBA, which is a big moment in an upcoming NBA legend's career. He sounded kind of irritated, in the OG way. At the end Charles Barkley asked what OG stood for, kind of a smirky question (probably to see if he could get him to smile), but his irritation level went wayyy up, and then Chuck didn't pronounce it right and OG told him. No smile. But that's who he is and it makes the great photo of him ecstatic with happiness that much more of a big deal and a huge un-OG smile. Loook everyone even OG is impressed! :-) #

If you love the Knicks, or even if you're just fascinated with this year's team, listen to today's Bill Simmons podcast, it's all about the phenomenon of the 2026 Knicks, and Simmons is a Celtics fan, definitely not a Knicks lover. I can't believe all these smart sports guys didn't know Brunson was a catch, if I recall correctly, just before the Knicks signed him, due to injury he had to lead the Dallas team in the first three games of the playoffs in 2022, and there you could totally see what no one had seen yet in the pros, he's a leader and rises to the occasion, which we all know very well now, you could see it then if you watched the games (which apparently I did). And btw he grew up in the NBA, his father was on the Knicks in 1999 the last time the team went to the finals. #