FeedCity

A truly memorable week. A birthday dinner and film, catching up with far-flung friends, two team away days with quizzes, amazing food, a Gillian Anderson cameo, cocktails and karaoke, culminating with a Clearleft alumni picnic (which I mostly missed). My throat is sore but my heart is full.

I love admiring spaces and thinking about how they work but, when it comes to the physical spaces I use most or every day – my bedroom, my desk, my bookshelves – I haven’t spent as much time thinking about decoration. When an environment functions, I don’t often think about ...

Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScrip...

Mark Gurman has talked to people who have used the new foldable iPhone:

People who have tried the Apple model like how it fits in a pocket, the feel and durability of the advanced hinge mechanism, and the new iPad-like app layouts that take advantage of the larger internal display. It’s going to be an ultra-premium device that provides a halo for the full Apple lineup and will be a marketing engine to get people into the company’s retail stores.

At $2k, it’s just too premium for me. I still think what I’d really want is a foldable iPad mini with no outer screen.

Beth Accomando interviewing Chuck Tingle Kelly got us tickets to see Chuck Tingle speak at KPBS San Diego Book Festival. It was a hot day and it was great to peruse the booths and the energy of the folks walking the USD campus was terrific. Aside: I got to tell Kelly (again) that my parents,...

Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage that kept me from getting anywhere. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, actually without breaking anything.

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.

1971 was a year of change. It brought out boxier typewriter designs like the dense plastic body shells of this French manufactured Hermes 3000 and a very similar, but rarer Sears Newport, which was manufactured by Messa in Portugal. Which one would you have chosen?  

📗 Want to read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch ISBN: 9780553902716

Wind turbine blade going up I-35. I’m always amazed at these, seeing them up close.

Reading a lot of replies on Mastodon, Bluesky, and even some on X to take the state of things. My blog post from last month is relevant this week. I don’t expect everyone on Mastodon to agree, but I hope those who care about safety will at least consider it.

Anil Dash in a follow-up reply on Bluesky after blogging about how to move away from Big AI:

People tried to shame folks out of using Instagram, out of using Uber, out of getting into crypto. How’s that going? What if, instead, we had focused on providing credible, pro-social community-based alternatives that addressed the things people thought they would get from those platforms?

He’s right that we can learn from the success of podcasting too.

Something I’ve been asking myself lately: what new things are possible when AI costs drop? I’ve been improving Micro.blog’s Logs page, and this morning updated it to rewrite confusing Hugo messages in more friendly language. It even localizes if your account isn’t set to English.

Love this. IndieWeb is punk:

Nobody’s waiting for permission to have a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s yours, and the nerve to hit publish.

🎸

We drove to Orange County yesterday. Kelly went to work, and I stole away to the beach at Huntington. I enjoy the scene at Huntington Beach, and I’ve been treated well by the folks in the water each time. Yesterday as I was walking out, in my wetsuit and carrying my swim fins and handplanes,...

Eavesdropping on the mandolinists preparing for this evening’s performance.

Claude helped me build a thing. There, I’ve admitted it, not that my use of LLMs has ever been a secret. But this was a big thing, a thing I could not have done on my own. I know because I tried, some years ago, and even with good help failed. Then I thought, I know what I want and I know how to break the overall task down into chunks and I know how to check that each chunk works the way I want it to before moving on. So I bought into a month of Claude.

I also took the trouble to read a ...

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

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