BTW, I sometimes ask Claude "what do you think" and it often has an opinion.

BTW thanks to Dave Carlick for noticing when I had fun writing a piece, laughing out loud at almost every sentence. Who's the biggest fan of my writing? Me. But sometimes I think of Dave C.

Some things Claude is extremely tedious at.

Earlier today I suggested doing an AI/UI overhaul for WordPress, and today I see the announcement of that from (apparently) an independent developer. Breath-taking.

The EFF gets everything wrong. It’s observable. Empirical. The EFF stands up for something that’s supposedly good for people and the web, but if you look closer, it’s actually bad for the web and the people, and serves the interest of big tech companies, usually Google.

Another truth, the user interface of WordPress could benefit from a total overhaul. Too many expedient choices over too many years that paper over bad design choices with yet more bad choices. But this kind of problem is relatively easy to fix. Make a list of all the feature...

I organize my work in OPML and have even taught Claude how to work with me in outlines.

I prefer to do my middle of the night iPad writing sprees on Twitter instead of Bluesky because no character limit. No one is going to read the stuff on either platform, so why not go for ease of use for writing.

It's remarkable that some people fondly miss Googles RSS reader app, already gone for over a decade. Remarkable because they captured the market, wiped out all competition (they deserved it, the products were awful) and then shut their own product down, leaving a toxic karmic bomb crater in its place.

As a writer I've stolen lots of ideas. All writers do it. How do you think we get our ideas.

Which is why it's so weird that they object to having their ideas stolen en masse.

We go through this regularly, basically you make a living doing something, and you aren't paid enough.

So every subject in every context arrives at the same place. Why aren't they paying me. I must be paid.

It is a permanent obsession with writers.

I try to be honest and admit that I steal from other writers, but I only steal from the best! :-)

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.