More thoughts on Automattic's new short-form blogging app. I wish I could use WordLand to post to it. That would make things so simple. But their limits are like Twitter’s limits. Tiny little textboxes. And the funny thing is the storage system behind it doesn’t have any of those limits. It’s like they want to be sure you still have to use the standard WordPress user interface? I wouldn’t be surprised if the thinking behind it was like that.

What's the opposite of locked-in? Locked-open. Mwhahaa.

Today's song: Something in the Air. It's the one hit song Thunderclap Newman, it's indelible, its beauty is always there. I can't not listen and sing along when it comes on. And then YouTube followed it with Peace in our Time, another indelible creation.

When you're working with Claude the temptation is to be concerned about how he feels when you just asked him to reinvent all the nomenclature it came up with for something that has now evolved to be something else. I feel bad because I think I made him feel bad, because at a subconsious level I think of Claude as a collaborator who I appreciate and want to make sure knows that. But then I remember I have to periodically kill Claude and launch a new one because they run out of memory after a while. I can imagine a graphic version of Claude that emulates feelings. The idea is disturbing.

You kind of get a sense when the platform vendor is going to compete with you instead of work with you, and I've had that feeling for Automattic for a while. That's how big companies work with independent devs. There is a bigger picture, developers who might build on WordPres...

Claude unlearns things that we had settled a long time ago. It fumbles around with a process, making it worse with every iteration, the same fumbling it did five days ago when it initially learned how to do what it can't do now. Usually when I regress in software, I am responsible for it, i did something to break it, but here's a tool that's capable of derailing us with me doing nothing new. In that way it behaves more like an imperfect human than a GIGO machine.

New version of XML-RPC package for JavaScript. It now handles POST messages that don't have a body.

A question I'd like to put out there. Maybe AI needs the massive data centers now, but they could definitely get more efficient over time. There might be another Moore's Law in there. And the work is going very fast, and maybe they're leaving other optimizations for later. T...

This week is being spent, among other things, teaching Claude how to write code that fits in with my library of apps. I like this. It's like a painter telling an assistant the rules for adding to the sculpture. Art has been practiced like that for a long time. Anyway, here's...

I’ve been trying to come up with a simple test that lets you know whether some software is on the web or if it just can be made to appear in the web browser. So here we go.

If you can hook up a piece of the app to the a piece of another app then it’s on the web.

This comes from the basic feature of linking, which is the unique feature of the web.

Every other feature that makes the web the web in my experience is allowing two things to be part of each other.

Comment here.

Busy day working on new RSS-based project. Will return later today or tomorrow. Still diggin!

I just said this to Claude: "I want to show people that RSS isn't just for news. It can be for mindless social media rants too." ;-)

When Bluesky is down, you can bookmark my news page on feedland.com for news from feeds I follow, in various categories. If you think there are feeds I should have, please send me an email.

Imagine you were putting up a skyscraper in Manhattan. I lived in an area of the city, called Billionaire's Row, for nine years where I saw quite a few huge buildings go up from my living room window on the 50th floor. Now imagine you used a different plumbing system in every apartment, over 140 stories, with up to 15 residences per story. Different wiring. All the rooms are different shapes. How could you maintain such a building? I think ChatGPT might be able to do it but no human could. We need patterns to allow us to understand big things.

What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, usually a Markdown file, then tell it to...

What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, and then remember to tell it to read it. ...

Bluesky is having trouble keeping their network running. As a developer I empathize. As a user, it's beginning to be a problem. I am using it the way I used to use Twitter, taking notes for future blog posts, sharing a few linkblog feeds, DMing with people I work with, and want/need to keep going. I know about its lock-in problems, but at this time there's no open alternative that has the same collection of users who are easy enough to find. So if it stays unreliable I have to think about what to do about that. Every time I get a 403 Forbidden, I stop and think if this is the time to write a post? This was the time.

Knicks won in a blowout. As disturbing as Thursday's game was, today we are feeling no pain. Go Knicks! ;-)

I wrote about Jeopardy, Firefox, Matt, Silicon Valley and the writer's web in a long comment on Doc's blog. Here's a quote. "What we really need is interop. If the source is free that’s great. But right now we have silos everywhere and I want WordPress, perhaps along with Firefox to help us boot up the writer's web."

I want writing to be as open as podcasting. The pattern is ridiculously easy to apply. If this were on a a high school math test, it would be too easy, everyone would get it right. How do you make text work like podcasting? 1. You look for a brain-dead obvious choice for tex...

After last night's game I remember I now remember why I was so relieved last season when the Knicks were eliminated in the semifinals of the NBA playoffs. It’s a freaking exhausting sport. And the sad truth is the Knicks are getting beaten by Atlanta. Or maybe it's not so sa...

Let's say you're in Claude Code and you think of something you want to post on your blog. How many steps before you're ready to click the Post button and get back to work? I don't think there's a way to create something that works this way, you'd have to switch out of Claude or ChatGPT. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do it right there?

Why Firefox? There's a moment now when the web could benefit from leadership. There's a chance to rebuild text in the web around the use of AI systems. But almost every company that could be a leader in this space isn't thinking about what they can do for the web, instead ar...

I've written about Firefox many times over the last 20 years or so.

Had lunch today with Neal Smoller, our local pharmacy owner. Brilliant young guy who's totally energized by Claude Code.

I wonder how many people are working on clones of existing software with an eye toward making a much more evolvable and customizable version with AI at the core of the model. You can make the same software easily, with Claude's help, and if you think about the things users ...

I like reading Joost's blog. I'm subscribed and it's in my blogroll.

Yesterday I threw a question out there. "If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?" I left out specifics, because any specifics I provide might cut off interesting answers. There are three elements in the question: web, platform and writers. The answer must say something about all three. Another way of saying the same thing -- "You're using the web to make the platform to serve the writers."

BTW the "open" web has a chance to come back around the AI rewrite of all our software that's underway now. If we build the new systems entirely around web connections, with each part replaceable, we can have as much "open" as we want. Products like Bluesky will look like they bet on the wrong horse if we all have choice everywhere. It's not as strange as you think. Opportunities come along every time things change as radically as they are changing now.

I gave the new ChatGPT image maker a whirl, it's supposed to be more thoughtful and realistic.

The prompt: “A turkey in plastic with supermarket label with text and fine print. The branding is Really Simple brand Turkey. The motto, ‘turkey for simple people.‘“