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 seen the new Game of Thrones just completed their 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 this show is good, so I will 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 do...

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 onlsy 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. 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.

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple. We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before...

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.

Also a note to Hypercard enthusiasts, I wouldn't be surprised if you could do this with that programming environment which is a contemporary of Frontier.

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 vario...

It took one week to port UserTalk and the Frontier runtime environment, verbs, object database, etc for Frontier. I spent the next week being shattered by what happened the week before.

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.

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.

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

I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that a Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans born here on this planet. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone, not just a few. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists. All of us. Even the people who say they aren't.

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.”

TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance. It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat proje...

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.

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.

Claude is not ready to run the world, not even a very small part of it. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me.

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.

A story from the deep dark history of my blog. I got an email from Steve Wozniak inviting me to lunch at one of our favorite retaurants, By The Bucket, in Santa Clara. He told me that the board had decided to fire the Apple CEO, he gave me the date and time. I wasn't surprised, it was kind of expected. I wasn't a reporter, so I gave the story to a friend at the San Jose Mercury-News, and she did the reporting, and then on the morning of the big event, I wrote a blog post saying it was time to fire him. A couple of hours later, as if responding to my post, they did. That might have been Peak Dave in Silicon Valley.

Taking some time off the breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and talked 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. W...