Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests.

I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed. It was one of the things that broke in the transition to current MacOS for Frontier.

Here's a screen shot of a new verb we just added, to facilitate nightly backups. I want to save off a fresh copy of frontier.root every night, as well as my guest databases. This is how that will work.

Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people.

New verb: string.addressToString. This is how I'm releasing examples.

Chigurgh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The Find command doesn't work. But I have hobbled my way to working code, and I have help debugging with Claude, and it is amazing at that. Frontier didn't know that Claude was going to save its life. More proof that you never know what is just around the corner.

If you want to get an idea of the kind of user interface you can create using Claude Code, with a driver (me) who has ample experience developing such things, have a look at demo.rss.chat. The UI was entirely done by Claude with me directing, very fine-tuning stuff. Claude can't really grok user interfaces because it is not visual and it is not a user. It might be able to test them, to some extent. Anyone can create an account on the demo server, that's what it's there for. And if something interesting breaks out there, that would be even better. I even tolerate a small amount of spam, and testing is definitely allowed (that's why it's there). ;-)

There are problems people aren't talking about, that are immediate, and go against all the security practices the web has been built on. Here's a story of what happened in my setup in mid-August. First fact, Claude Code (CC) is different from regular Claude in that it is us...

Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created a podcast. And it showed up in all the right places. Might be worth listening to as well. Now let's see if this shows up on daveverse.org, that's what I'm really testing. (It worked.)

New podcast. Knicks in Five! (It's not about the Knicks.)

I wish there were a way to set the dock icons on a Mac. In going from the old machine to the new, the icons are all different. I am juggling so many apps right now, and totally don't appreciate that.

When Claude has a clear task to do, it does it well, and exhaustively in a way no human could manage.

I'm now trying to come up with projects I can try that change things in visible ways so I can see which parts don't work. For example, I have a new Snarky Slogan to add to the list.

I am working on the new system now. It feels like I had a nice enough house that I have lived in for decades, sitting across the way, where I've been constructing a new super luxury house with all the things a modern personal publisher and code-partner to Claude would want. But until yesterday I could only simulate what it would be like to use it, I was still living in the old comfortable well-worn and out of date in so many ways. Today I'm sitting at the other chair typing this. Now the question is -- when I click the Publish button what will happen? Here we go. Well fuck me, it worked the first fucking time. Knicks in five! :-)

I want to develop a scripting interface for Mastodon from Frontier. I need a test account for us to use. I have applied at two public Mastodon hosts and answered the question honestly, I want to use it to test a new scripting system, probably doesn't sound too warm and fuzzy.

Bluesky: "Meanwhile there are serious security issues that are covered up by this hype. I’m using this tech every day, unlike the reporters, and as often happens they’re chasing the wrong story."

A new snarky slogan: Knicks in 5.

I'm doing a difficult corner-turn today. I have Atlantis running on my old machine, the one that's still running the very old version of MacOS so I could keep running Frontier there. Yesterday I did my first attempt to move that to my new MacBook, running the latest OS. And it took a while to copy all the files, and get it right, I had to format the drive on the new machine, not the old one. And once it was all running, I realized I was running an old version of frontier.root. This is more complicated here because the root files are loaded into an SQL database. And something went wrong there. Not exactly where I wanted to be, but not surprising either. Taking lots of snapshots. One thing I don't want to happen, to be without my latest work. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. Knicks in 5.

Data centers are like gas stations, but because the pumps work at the speed of light, you can put them anywhere on earth.

Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier.

WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time.

BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!

The AI companies shouldn't only be listening the politicians and journalists, even the base developers, they should be tuning into their users, and what kinds of apps they can do under the current security setup. Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it to do this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. I always think of things it could do to make my mess of an archive more useful, but I can't give it access to any of that stuff, I would never know if any of it was deleted or replaced, there are no critical apps that would make it known to me. Every customer of theirs must be grappling with the same thing. How do I get the benefit without having to trust this app with things it is unwise to trust it with.

Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.

The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)

FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's new River Embed for FeedLand plugin you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to create a timeline, and when you're ready show the river to readers of your WordPress site, using the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions.

Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products tod...

Screen shot of my current system.verbs.apps table. You can tell from reading it that it's been a long time since I've thought much about scriptable apps.

BTW, the rootupdates process is working now, you can follow changes via an RSS 2.0 feed, of course. In this version, the feed is the way updates are transmitted. The enclosure on each item is a fat page. And because it's a feed, I can follow it in FeedLand, and the blogroll on scripting.com picks it up too. Screen shot.

Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.