Today's song: So into you.

We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don;t have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing.

Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn't run. It's been ...

The governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless he can prove he’s actually alive.

I had watched almost three seasons of Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn't have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It's so good it actually makes this dark and confusing show worth watching. If you haven't been watching, imho you can start in season 3, and maybe read some recaps. You want enough of the boredom so you can revel in the brilliance of this season's end. And there is another season coming, the last one, and this time it's interesting.

I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted ...

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.

And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.

Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.

That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.

That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.

For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.

PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter.

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, from a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. But when I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the problem. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.

It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.

More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Somet...

Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).

6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.

I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.

Back to work Dave!

Everyone is introducing themselves on the Berkman community mail list, at the beginning of the fall semester, and here's the story I am telling. Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04, worked on blogging, podcasting, RSS, political blogging and the ...

A bunch of tech billionaires have chipped in a million each to fund a new Linux distribution. I can't imagine how this is supposed to work, all those huge human egos, how much will they pay their developers to contribute what. I have to find out what the goal of the project is. It would be nice to have a Linux that was extensively tested for use by regular people.

After saying I was putting my tech work aside, yesterday, I had a bolt of determination, and realized I don't like collaborating with Claude Code, but maybe it's just when we get to this stage of a project where it's all details, and they're hard to communicate, and the bot has a bad habit of ignoring things I tell it to do. It also returns code to me to test that no human developer would pass on to a user. It would be too embarrassing. But the bot isn't aware in the same way a human is, not even close. Now that is something I'm sure they can be taught to simulate well enough to be as good as a human collaborator.

We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot.

The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky.

Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. assume they consent. And the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive.

If you View Source on a fatpage, scroll to the bottom, you'll see the code. Example. The idea is that the docs for the code are what you see in the browser. Maybe that's the way feeds should work too? Something to think about.

I begin the month of September for some reason, not feeling like working. And rather than succumb to the work ethos, I'm allowing myself to goof off with the same determination that I worked my ass of for so many years. I think the last time I felt like this was when I was a...

Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.

OPML archive for August 2026.

Fatpages. I'm working on a code release that's on the path to Frontier. It reads and writes fatpage files, a format we invented for releasing new and updated parts for Frontier in 1997. So this is very old but perfectly useful technology that's being built in a new release of Frontier, the first in 1.5 decades, depending on how you count years and forks.

Claude Code is like Victor Wembanyama, assuming you follow the NBA and are interested in my first-hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so.

I've been watching The Pitt, but it can be a bit much, so I went looking for something a bit lighter, and found 9 to 5 on Amazon Prime. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are the stars, and Dolly's famous song with the same name is the theme. It's a perfect slice of the world I grew up in. I get it confused with Working Girl which came out eight years later, with a similar theme -- what if women ran the business world, how much better would that be? Working Girl also had a really good theme song, written and performed by Carly Simon.

Best explainer I've read about the last episode of Silo.

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.

My posts are also available on Mastodon, made possible by WordPress, where I mirror my posts from my original blog. A lot of what's in the post makes it through, but not all of it. This is where we need to do some work, connecting a blog like mine, to WordPress and Mastodon, with no loss of fidelity.

Trump is rotting in the presidency, and that is becoming more and more dangerous, because this time they had a plan, the most radical part of the Repubs, and have deployed a new secret police force and have introduced the nation's military to the nation's capital. It was all super insidious as it was starting up, and watching the news I wonder why they don't talk about this in terms of the upcoming election.