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Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

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Toni Schneider, Bluesky's new CEO

Bluesky has a new CEO, Toni Schneider former CEO of Automattic. I have known Toni for many years, dating back to his startup, Oddpost, that I praised on my blog, and his partner was then quoted in Wired saying Scripting News is media. That meant a lot to me at the time, and ...

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Manton's Inkwell

My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. ...

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Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t do it because I don’t know."

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An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks on my link. The user then pastes the URL where they want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor.

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AIs can reason

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others I had been trying were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telli...

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Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting bet...

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Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A piece I wrote in 1996 after going to a tech industry conference."

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Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate.

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He was a trust buster

If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.

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Cory, RSS has never been dormant

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom. Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop...

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Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users.

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I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too.

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I remember liking the first three seasons of Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'l...

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Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?

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The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video.

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Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress.

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If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help.

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On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT.

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What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.

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We're having a problem with one of the servers, spending pretty much all day trying to learn about the problem. It means a bunch of services aren't working. Will keep the blog updated, assuming that works. ;-)

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The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if i...

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I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file. Like this.

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Really Simple pizza

"If you like pizza you might like this."

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Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these mind bombs for me.

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I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new.

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I'm tuned into the Fediforum

11:35AM I wrote some stuff in the comment section thinking I'd paste them in here, but that didn't work. But if you've been reading my blog you've heard it all before. 11:14AM They have a new format which includes "tables" for up to six different participants. It's a go...

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Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)

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If you followed me on Twitter, follow me on Bluesky. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that book. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the fuck, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.

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A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.

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opmlProjectEditor format

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work...