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...

A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version now. Thanks!

One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.

Of course I love RSS. ;-)

Ultimately AI will flatten out the differences in languages.

The month of July is history. A fine month. A coral reef was seeded.

The hardest thing for people to get about open systems is that if you move forward, not only do you benefit, but your competitors benefit equally. When one of them takes but doesn't give back, that's even worse. But you do it anyway because otherwise eventually, without interop, no one can move.

If you run your own RSS.chat instance, you can now add a menu of commands to the menubar. Details in the worknotes for today. I added a DW menu to rss.chat or demo.rss.chat.

A new validator for RSS.chat-compatible apps. Examples. The everyone feed on rss.chat. A user's feed. The user list. A feed with issues. Docs.

Dave + Claude is far more powerful than either on their own.

Claude, as we're finishing a project: "The diving is what makes it a test of the network, not just the file: it doesn't take the feed's word for anything, it goes and knocks on every door the feed points to."

Claude doesn't iterate over UI design. It doesn't have eyes or have a human mind. It can't evaluate a design. It works best when you can present the whole design before it writes a any code. That does happen, for example when porting a product across OSes.

I wonder if anyone else is writing about Claude from a similar point of view. I've been writing commercial software since the early 80s. I slogged through this stuff at a comparative snail's pace until early this year, when I got blasted into outer space. Now I had to learn how to make use of this incredible new physics. Puts me in something of a unique spot. I also have a very large library of under-marketed software, ready to grind through Claude, which I very much want to do. If you know of anyone writing about this kind of stuff, let me know.

I've been saying this for decades. The Dems need touring comedians doing rallies all over the country. They can say whatever they want, call the president a commie. There's been a comedy-gap.

Listened to this podcast interview with Andy Hertzfeld one of the lead devs on the Macintosh, he talks about his time at General Magic and Google too. His interviewers were surprised that he likes developing with AI tools. People think that developing is just coding, but tha...

Our feed parser is updated to understand the new elements for RSSchat.

I want one social network with lots of branches where ideas flow in ways people want them to flow. Take the big corporations out of the middle. They have not served us well because they aren't in the business of serving us. They can provide unique user interfaces for reading or writing. They should be as diverse as apps are everywhere else but the web.

A new this.how page for RSS.chat. I'll point to it from blog posts.

Yesterday's Scripting News was one of the most news-full days in a long time, maybe going back to the rollout of RSS 2.0 in Sept 2002. If you look at what's there, a post about re-opening the Frontier object database format would be considered the top item on any other day, ...