I've been watching short videos about training dogs, and really opening my eyes, and it helps when working with Claude. Always try to be positive, until there is behaviour you have to correct and then yank the leash, and when they do the right thing reward them with a treat (or whatever passes as a treat).

Highly recommend the interview between Scott Galloway and Heather Cox Richardson. Quite a combination of minds. Don't skip to the end but don't miss it, they explain how blogging allowed them to route around the gatekeepers. That's the point. But imho you have to leave the door open to those who are inspired by you, and Substack isn't the best place for them. Please keep your ears open to new less tech industry ways of getting your ideas out. The bigco's haven't just screwed up the political system, they've also screwed up the web. The web needs all our help as does democracy, and the two imho are closely related.

New header graphic for scripting.com. Did this one with ChatGPT, asked it to make a Burma-Shave sign sequence and gave it a few examples, and now it knows how to do another one of these for me in the future. I've been using it that way to come up with desktop icons for my apps.

Braintrust query: Does Google define the web?

Yesterday I called the Knicks championship the "greatest sports win in a long time," but I have to say the fans of the Milwaukee Brewers would have cause to object. They had an incredible season in MLB, were written off by the pundits much the same way they wrote off last season's Knicks. They even won the World Series in the same Knicks in 5 way the Knicks did it, with a sweep of the much-hated Dodgers, with their better pedigree along the way. So to my Wiscowtown friends, who are holding their parade today, congrats on your first championship in 53 years like the Knicks, or more accurately their first championship ever.

Yesteday I sent a snapshot of the scripting.com bucket from AWS to Claude and asked it to analyze it, what's in it, what's taking up all the space, and got back an excellent report. Overnight I thought of another question, summarized in this prompt. "this is fascinating. i wo...

People in ChatGPT-land are talking about Frontier. Not sure who they are or what the context is, but I agree, and want to do more integrations between our codebase and the AI runtimes.

Posted on Twitter re Frontier being real in 2026, not just a memory.

I was pretty sure the Knicks just needed to settle down, but the fans and the city and journalists and to some extent the team were still living mentally in June, in the aftermath of the greatest sports win in a long time. Then the team lost three, probably because they too ...

I'm doing a little project on rss.chat today and dusting off the cobwebs of my brain. Since I last worked on this project, I have converted Frontier to run on modern OSes and written a whole new app. Only three months, but I have no recollection, even reading the code isn't helping much. This is when it's incredibly good to have Claude Code on the job, I can ask it to guide me through the process we worked out which feels like it was 15 years ago instead of 15 weeks. It has complete recall. And even though it didn't work on Frontier, that was a different Claude project, it was able to debug something that broke in the build script in the interim. I've spent the whole year teaching Claude how to be me. Is that a source of immortality? I won't be around to figure that part out.

Braintrust query: Why do you love Markdown? I have a theory why people love it so much -- simplicity. You can't hide any garbage in a Markdown file. You can answer on GitHub or Twitter. Didn't post on Masto or Bluesky because the prompt is 761 chars, over the limit for both systems. I think I'm finally done with truncating well-written prose to fit into one vendor's idea of what's enough text for me. I want to make that a distant memory. So another thing I love about Markdown -- no freaking character limit.

I really like the Apple TV show Small Prophets. It's silly and fun, but also intelligent and beautifully presented. Michael Palin of Monty Python is a supporting actor playing the main character's father. He's famous for a lot of Monty Python sketches, esp the one about the dead parrot. "He's not dead, he's pining for the fjords."

Yesterday Ben Thompson wrote that we've reached the end of the web, and I had come to the same conclusion, just a few days ago. And his piece, which was a great milestone, said it's not totally gone, because of the advent of AI we can build small systems for each other. Which...

Zettelkasten is an idea pioneered by my great-uncle Arno Schmidt. It's a process for organizing your data and thoughts. When I read people's descriptions of what they do with it, it sounds totally like the outliners I pioneered two generations later. I have a Zettlekasten blog in my blogroll, screenshot, so I think of Uncle Arno, who I never met, from time to time.

If Claude Code projects had feelings, I'd wake up the Frontier project and let it know that the reason it's been asleep so long is that the software is working. I'm using it to manage the other three apps, writing code, keeping lists, everything works. Yes, the menubar is very out of date, but I know where to find everything. I look forward to coming in for a landing at some point and upgrade it work among the different BigUndo stuff we have running, no doubt we're going to use Frontier to do cross-app scripting. Some of the things AI says they need to do, Frontier can do with the resources of an early 90s Macintosh. No big data centers. Keep that in mind.

I loved the term Big Undo so much, of course I had to get the domain. I started putting up my usual placeholder site but realized I should do this page in Markdown, not HTML. It looks fabulous. Markdown is right. It's sobriety, go back to the beginning and put the potency in the ideas, give writers the space to write. Get the F out of my way with your freaky character limits. Anyway I'm full of manifesto these days. The money people strangled the web. I think it's time for the creative people to make it work for real.

I remember how revolutionary the first web was, but then a series of tech companies took it over and “had their way” with it. The first was Netscape and they added JavaScript to steal the thunder from “Sun” (a long story). Then Microsoft crushed Netscape by cutting off the...

I've never had a web browser that worked remotely like I wanted it to do. But that might change soon. Big things are possible now. I have a bunch of projects that I'm working on with Claude and going back and forth between them. And they're even starting to communicate with each other, at my behest of course. It's an interesting time for people to realize that the web was much more powerful before all the big tech companies had their way with it. It makes about as much sense as the various big plans they all came up with that made the web necessary in the first place.

Changed my bio on Twitter: "I make software to interop. Working on a new web designed for writers and readers and in place of HTML we use Markdown. Keep it super simple. The big undo."

Obama is doing the old Obama campaign schtick and it's something to see. He's got a few gray hairs, but he's still got the energy and chutzpah. I'd love to see him and Bernie Sanders on the same stage before this campaign is over. My favorite Obama clip is him wiping the schmutz off his shoulder, I forget who he was putting down, but wow it so concise. I also really liked the time when HRC flirted with him about her likeability. "You're likeable enough," he said. Trump gets the votes not necessarily because people are what people call them, he is a comedian, I say this so many times, that's the charm. Young folk may not remember Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, but that's Trump, and the other two probably had a sweet side, but I don't think that's ever been said about Trump. I could be wrong. There's also a bit of George Carlin in there.

Why did the Knicks lose the first two games of the season? It's a veteran team, they know how to start an NBA season, but the fans and the press aren't ready to move on yet. They're still reveling in the feeling of the Knicks winning. But imho there is no feeling with that, the feeling was in the moment, and man they did give us some moment. We will relish the video for the rest of time. But for now, every game they play will feel significant because of who they were not who they are now.

Andrew Shell, who created and runs the rssCloud server we use here, is creating a connection from rssCloud and webSub to WebSockets. I've wanted this for a long time, but now I'm planning on a desktop version of FeedLand, we will need it, pretty soon for instant updates of feeds we are subscribed to.

One of the reasons I'm working on the Web of Markdown is that my main blog of 32+ years is being kicked off the Google Web. I need a new home where the web religion is still practiced, and one of the commandments of our religion is "Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules."

A blog post from Scripting, in Markdown.

Previous posts on this topic: Oct 6 and Oct 8.

What's new? I've got a browser running, and have been using it for a few weeks. We're not releasing it today because first I want people to think about the format we're using to represent a story, and get feedback, and see if other people can build on the same basis.

Three things to look at today.

• The top level picture.
• Nine examples.
• Download the archive.

And if you have questions or comments.

• Use the Issues section in the repo.

Ooops, didn't get it done today. Please come back tomorrow. :-)

I hope to see the The Web of Markdown idea take the next step later today or early tomorrow at the latest. Still diggin!

Perfect autumn day in the mountains spent mostly away from the computer. Still, some interesting new stuff to show tomorrow.

Today's song, for the Knicks. "And when the morning light comes streaming in I get up and do it again." Knicks in 5!

My friend Guy Kawasaki has a quote from the early Mac division at Apple. "Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players. But B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to F players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies." You see this over and over among the very rich in tech. The money is supposed to make them invincible, but they don't hire the best people, I guess, for fear of being found out to not be the genius that the money says they are.