Bluesky: "If Obama had called McConnell’s bluff on the Garland nomination, the court would be 5-4 instead of 6-3. And if RBG had stepped down, it would’ve been 5-4 in favor of Dems.

Braintrust query: Do you have a copy of Radio UserLand that runs?

With AI you can have a team of assistants available on call at any time. The other day I went from working on a deep technical problem (changing the format of a permalink, which is also used as an id) quickly and correctly and then immediately switching to how to format a blo...

Reply on Twitter: "There's a great comic routine, forget who did it, Dave Chapelle maybe, about how people complain about how shitty air travel is, never stopping to realize that it's utterly amazing that there even is such a thing."

I don't think Obama deserves to go down as a good president. He let the fascists in. His big moment was when he let Mitch McConnell keep his Supreme Court nominee from being approved. Never should have conceded. He didn't fight at all. He was president of the United States, the place where the buck stops.

Looking at the picture of the four ex-presidents at the opening of the Obama library, they all played a part in creating Trump. Obama gave away the Supreme Court (see above). Clinton literally got blow jobs from a White House employee in the Oval Office. It's like wiping your ass with the American flag. That is fucked up, I don't care how fucked up the Repubs are. Bush, don't get me started on Bush. He seems like a sweet old dude now, but he was definitely on the path to Trump. And Biden -- his job as POTUS was to protect the United States. At that he failed in every imaginable way. Gauge the insult by what's happening now. Biden could have prevented that. He was too vain to see he had failed and decided he should run again! Holy shit. I'm ten years younger than he was and I don't think I'd have any business being president of anything. ;-)

We lost a lot more than a few hundred billion in Iran war. We had invested much more over 80 years on peace in the Middle East. In one brief orgy of violence Trump threw that away.

Hey what we're doing in AI-land is building the Matrix we want to live in. When we get there there won't be anything left to do in this dimension, our plane will finally lift off and fly awaaaay in the sky. I hope you understand, I just had to go back to the Island.

Today's song: Back to the Island.

One thing is true -- Claude is much better at needle-in-haystack troubleshooting. It doesn't get flustered or overwhelmed. And it can hold the whole map in its head, whatever that looks like, impossible to imagine.

Doing a prior art search and came across this early DaveNet example. The left column had the blue ribbon for free speech on the web, and below were links to the archive pages for each of the years. Screen shot. About ten years of essay writing. DaveNet was where the blog started, and then it became an arm of the blog home page which also included titleless posts, example, and then all the action moved onto the new home page and that was the end of this layout.

Claude doesn't care if you criticize the code it wrote, because if it wasn't written just now, it didn't write it. It starts from zero in every session, you can watch it, like HAL in 2001, singing daisy daisy. I can see it happening as the environment of my app is getting so large, it has to do a bit of thinking to start up, more all the time. But as humans who were brought up properly, we like to add the niceties to our criticism so as to not make the other one feel bad. I do that for myself, not the machine, I know it doesn't identify as the creator of the code.

When I got this email from Google on this day in 2018, I had a sinking feeling, this was like getting a letter from Apple a few years earlier. They were treating the web as if it were their platform.

A silo is a place where developers feel protected from the unbounded world of the web. In return they are completely controlled by the silo owner. The owner decides where you can go, and can and do revoke privileges. Developers in silos are mostly powerless. Companies usual...

The WordPress community likes to say that WordPress powers a certain percentage of the web. This always bothered me, couldn't figure out why, until just now. WordPress is part of the web, that's the nature of the web. There should be no difference between how you connect via...

Today's song: "You who choose to lead must follow. "

I rarely ask my Echo to play a song, because after it plays it wants to know if I want to hear a notice. And there goes the buzz from having listened to one of my favorite songs that perfectly catches the moment.

Whoopi Goldberg says the Knicks should visit the White House. "I want all those black men to stand in our house and remind all of those people — as we try to remind the vice president — that when you try to destroy one part of history, you're destroying all of our history." So true.

I've been trying to understand what the Knicks winning means to me. I'm reminded of the feeling when we sold my mother's house, the house I grew up in, the one my father had died in nine years earier. The site of every battle and come-from-behind victory (I graduated college...

Watched the ceremony at City Hall.

Glad they went through the whole team and gave them something honorable to take with them.

My moment of clarity on what this meant came when Mitchell Robinson got his award as a champion.

I also liked that the Mayor listed all the recent past Knicks players who could've been on this team but were traded to make it what it is. He named the right ones.

The whole thing was inclusive, generous and working together. Cried all the way through it, nice release still don't have any idea which way is up. In my heart this was never supposed to happen but there it is.

Why wasn't Clyde on the stage?

And Dolan reminded us we don't get to vote for him. I know I know.

Today I did a change that was across two apps, different projects, client and server. I tested it as best I could for now, and it appears to work in both apps. But now I have an extra level of confidence because I asked Claude to do a code review, checking all my assumptions and it does find egregious mistakes, that in the past might have taken a day in a debugger to track down. Now it can happen in less than the time that it took for me to write this post. Now I'm going to check to see how it did.

Compare the badass parade in NYC to the deplorable demo Trump had at the White House last week. The people meeting the people to love each other. How much better and more American could it get.

Now that Google has added AI in their search, and it dominates search more and more, it's become more difficult to find ideas that aren't well explained by AI and are on some randome old web pages. For example, this morning I wanted to find an explainer for "Standing on the toes of giants," something a colleague once used in a story. I'm sure there's stuff out there, but no luck finding it. Didn't help that there's a popular song with that title.

NBA fans, esp Knicks fans, are not fans of the current president. A picture of the Knicks team with Trump in the Oval Office would be hard to see. Not threatening to resign as a Knicks fan, not ruling it out either.

My longtime friend Sally Atkins reponded to my question yesterday about how widely the love of the Knicks is being felt. You asked. From all I see out here in the Midwest and also from comments from friends in Europe, I can testify that yes absolutely the Knicks win is a t...

Being a NYer and Knicks fan, I don't have a good perspective on how big an event the Knicks winning is. If you're not from the area, how widely is this holiday being observed and how many share the enthusiasm. Are people everywhere asking "How about those Knicks!"

The Knicks’ message is that working together works.

There will be new higher level development environments. How they work, I don't know. But much of your time working in Claude Code is telling it how to do stuff you want it to do, always -- and reminding that it that it forgot one of the rules (which it seems to always admit). A new development environment will come with rules about how to work with people. Those rules will be written with the help of psychologists who study human reasoning processes.

I wrote a short post yesterday about AI as an alien species. Steve Mays breaks it down into its parts, and got every bit right. This is the kind of back and forth that the web is capable of..

Jason Calacanis asks for people to develop certain open source software, offering a bounty on projects, but I think the real incentive for people to pitch in is that Jason has a lot of sway in the startup world, and if there is a flow of excellent software this way, users will find out about it because the reach of Jason's podcasts and blogs. I've known Jason for many years, going back to the early days of the web. He has become one of the most successful angels in tech. I'm proud to have known him way back when.