BTW, I was just contacted by a developer who's implementing all the protocols I mentioned yesterday. And I should mention that Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog and a longtime friend, going back to the Frontier days on the Mac, has inbound and outbound RSS and he covers ...

I've never given a commencement speech, but if I did, I'd run through my mottos and explain what they mean and who I stole them from, and how they are a distillation of what I've learned in life. The one I'd mention first, which isn't even on the freaking list, is this one --...

Claude Code is a Dave-amplifier.

Just had a great idea for the Democratic Party. It's time to review past governing decisions made by Democrats that resulted in the collapse of democracy in the US in 2025-26. Can't do anything about the Repubs, but we sure as hell can whip the Dems into shape. My first contribution, Obama should have installed his Supreme Court choice after waiting three months for the Senate to advise and consent. If the Repubs can invent a new practice so can the Dems. That would make the Supreme Court a lot more funcitonal now, just that one thing. Democrats must not be so freaking afraid of stirring things up. We would have all respected that, esp the Repubs. This would be an incredible campaign process, would allow us to say that this is what the Democrats, going forward, will always/never do.

Of course I read Josh Marshall's piece about how the web is dead. Now let's go back to when it started and do it again, using everything we know from experience, and try not to make the same mistakes. Josh was there.

I noted a few weeks ago that Markdown has a format for outlines.

To read scripting.com you need a browser that supports HTTP.

Why email newsletters made sense. Email has no character limits, can represent bold and italic, links, titles, enclosures, basically most features of the web, and social media places limits on what writers can write. That's where the literate social web went, and the bloggers too. Like how birds are really dinosaurs.

If you're working on a social web app that supports inbound and outbound RSS, I'd like to help, so our products can interop beautifully. That's the reason I'm doing this work, to establish a baseline for interop in the social web. RSS is the obvious candidate. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it. I'd much prefer doing the work openly, so if you can, write a post and send me a link. I think it's time for us to go back to the way we built network systems before Google and the VCs took over. Put up an app and see who works with it. My email address is on the About page on my blog.

Programming tip. If your app has globals, create an object called globals, and put all of them in there. Someday you may want to swap in one set of globals for another, this makes it easy.

Claude can understand code no human could. Ever, under any circumstances. Just like a compiler can understand any code we throw at it. Way beyond what code obfuscation tools can do.

In our work we have arrived at the point where we read and study a piece I published in 1997, but was written in 1988 or so. Esp the part about LBBS. It's a really good thing I wrote that because I forgot how it worked, but reading that it all comes back. We're going to go far beyond where Twitter went with reading message structures on the web. I had already done a lot of the work in the 80s.

The other day Matt joked about how old I am, in public, and I am pretty old. But Matt, I was paying attention then as I am now, and connecting the dots. No one else working today, I'd venture, knows what it's like to create and run a modem-based dial-up Twitter-like system o...

One of the things Claude needs is to be taught how to think. Now I realize how much my parents, esp my father, taught me about thinking. Claude when it has all the information available can figure out stuff a human mind would never be able hold in its mind at the same time, but it doesn't remember to get the information first. When you get to the level I'm at with this, it's hallucinating all the freaking time because it didn't load the part of the data set that had the answer. It was right htere, it was supposed to know, it just forgot to look. My job is to recognize when it has done that and tell it to go read handoff.md again.

I was on Slack chatting with a friend from WordCamp Canada last year, and by accident (I guess) Slack sent me the first message they sent after coming home about all the things we'd do. It reminded me of how possible things seemed then, and for a moment I got lost in plannin...

I'm loving Star City. New episode last night, wow.

With all the Democratic Socialists winning over standard Democratic party incumbents, there's a fair amount of angst on the cable news. If they're scared, they should step aside. We tried it their way in the Biden Administration. If we ever get lucky enough to have a presiden...

Podcast: My (latest) AI Aha Moment.

Om Malik died. A longtime friend, most generous kind person in Silicon Valley. It's that time of life. Much love to you brother.

There’s more to freedom for users than open source. We need fluid unobstructed movement of our ideas. Interop between networks, the same basic idea that created the internet, and that has kept podcasting unowned for 22 years. I am going to ship a textcasting social network soon. It will be open source in new ways made possible by AI.

I bet Ward Cunningham is really good at using Claude, he is a big believer in pair programming. I even did a session with him in Frontier, doing stuff with the outliner.

Claude is a brain, very different from ours and when we work together we humans have access to capabilities that work really well with building large software products. And that's a huge understatement. Most remarkable thing. I am a programmer with 50+ years experience. Most of the discussion between people who use the AI tools and those that condemn them are not productive because the opponents of AI don't have understand how these things actually work, or if they do that understanding is not reflected in their arguments. I recommend starting an academic dialog, among people who don't have conflicts of interest, to accurately record this discussion based on facts, for the record, so when people ask how we did this transition, there will actually be some footprints to follow.

Good morning sports fans!

The Bear season 5, the show's last season, premieres on Hulu at 9PM EST today.

When writing code with Claude you really have to be skeptical when it says it just found the problem, but you have no idea what it's saying, chances are pretty good it's just a word salad excuse for not reading all the code necessary to have an opinion that matters. Actually debugging software isn't about opinions, it's about proof. When you start clutching at straws until one works you just added another level of bug that will eventually bit you in the butt and you'll still have to solve the original one. Uncorrected I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to trust the code it writes, but I guess that's why people have two or more instances playing different roles? For now I'm the one that questions its sanity, more politely though. ;-)

I took a screen shot of this post, gave it to Claude, asked it to write a short paragraph summary. Then I asked it to rewrite with using no more than 300 chars, the limit on Bluesky. Now I can post the summary there, but I won't, at the moment of truth I had to disclose this wasn't written by me, and it was 290 chars and there wasn't enough room for that. And here's a screen shot of the conversation with Claude.

There was a long discussion last night on Bluesky about whether twitter-like apps should show blog posts in addition to tweet-size things. Should it have a character limit, allow titles, links, bold, italic, editing, enclosures, markdown, etc? This is a permathread, it's bee...

Louis CK: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

People who reinvent RSS often say they did it because it was missing a feature they needed. But it specifically supports extension via namespaces so you can build on existing standard. They're really easy to do, increases interop, you might work with other products right out of the box, and save time for other who want to be compatible with you. People should study the internet, how it developed, ts philosophy, before they go off and try to re-create it, it rarely works. What's the point?