I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook, and hope to preserve it via the search feature here.

I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the news, literally. I thought maybe they had a vision beyond the usual dotcom slop. Not so fast. Your friends can't read the articles unless they become a registered user. I bet they always had that, but this time I read the smaller print. Why can't some company do something just for goodwill and free advertising, without such an obvious business model? Having people think you care counts in the business world. As Marge Gunderson from Fargo would say, "Don't you know that?"

What if one day Claude could only speak Chinese.

I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I ...

I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words. Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a s...

The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country. They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise. The Democrats can have any combination of points ...

I just went through hell trying to respond to a message that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I get an email from WordPress saying someone talked about me. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link...

If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype. Don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it.

Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time. Luckily yesterday wasn't a big news day, and you can read about it on the blog.

I was looking for a codename for a new scripting environment Claude and I are making attempting in every way to do exactly what Frontier does. But until it does that I need a nice name, memorable, maybe a bit magical and positive. Frontier has been gone, thought to be lost, but with the advent of Claude Code we were able to get it running again in current OSes on current hardware. I shouldn't call it Frontier because who knows if the end result will be compatible enough to claim that. But I want a codename that reflects hidden, forgotten and overlooked wealth. Like a civilzation that rose from the ashes," or as it turns out, the bottom of the ocean.

Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."

I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting question. Which I have answered.

I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.

Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively, The Agency, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it.

I seen the new Game of Thrones just completed their third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People this show is good, so I will give it another try.

Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We've do...

I want to connect RSS to AT Proto, both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I helped Leaflet, a very nice editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not onlsy in Bluesky but also in standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's. Getting independent developers working with each other is my mission, because first you have to have interop between the people before you can get interop between the apps.

Here's the sign of success. I wrote a post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to standard.site. What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a data structure in atmosphere that looks like an RSS item with different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See textcasting for more dogma.

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple. We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before...

BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this.

Also a note to Hypercard enthusiasts, I wouldn't be surprised if you could do this with that programming environment which is a contemporary of Frontier.

I'm trying to move my whole programming act from Frontier on the Mac to Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the projects I work on to keep my vario...

It took one week to port UserTalk and the Frontier runtime environment, verbs, object database, etc for Frontier. I spent the next week being shattered by what happened the week before.

There's a new version of the FeedLand server.

If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules.

Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.

I asked Claude for a list of popular feed readers that hook into WebSub. Turns out it wasn't a simple answer.

I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS.

RSS.chat now supports WebSub. This means that posts on RSS.chat will appear instantly in compatible feed reader apps.

I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that a Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans born here on this planet. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone, not just a few. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists. All of us. Even the people who say they aren't.