I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it’s just an app. I will be ready for the next thing […]

I spent the day programming in Atlantis. It’s buggy, and there are a few missing parts, but most of what I need is there. It’s starting to feel like Frontier, which is cool because that’s what we’re making. And I have my backup tools working on the new machine, praise Murphy.

Claude Code massively stinks at explaining things in a way that a human can understand.

I laid out some ideas for Bluesky and WordPress re Markdown and AI systems.

Scott Hanson is working on a WordPress plugin that displays a FeedLand river — a constantly-updated stream of news items from feeds a FeedLand user subscribes to — on a WordPress page or post. It’s important that news flows be part of managing a site. Help Scott make it perfect, WordPress is a very important […]

People love Markdown because it’s impossible to hide the crud. And because people love it so much it’s become a favorite of tech startups esp in the AI field. This is a great turn of events. We’re getting back to the web, and the sooner everyone gets on board, the better. I’ve written about this […]

Microsoft has figured out the appeal of Markdown, it’s impossible to hide the crud, and this is how a big company with a big messy product line, pivots to make sense in the new world of AI tools. Someone at MS either remembers or had studied the transition from PC operating systems to the web. […]

A big corner-turn in the Atlantis project, the new version of Frontier for modern OSes, in development, just me and Claude Code so far. We now have the means to update the root, so anything implemented in script code can be released without fuss, using RSS of course. We’re using a method that will be […]

On the other hand, why doesn’t Microsoft, which owns GitHub, make a Slack-alike tool that manages the issues sections on repos. Slack is a big part of the default communication system, but GitHub is another very big part. And the great thing is that both these products, owned by huge tech companies, have an ethos […]

We got past the bump, and I’m getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it’s got a lot of integrations, which you want when you’re using, but hard when you’re getting it all to work the […]

Today’s song: So into you.

Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn’t run. It’s been like this for two weeks. No wonder every day before […]

The governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless he can prove he’s actually alive.

I had watched almost three seasons of Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn’t have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It’s so […]

I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted […]

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users. And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice. Just coming out with something better […]

It’s around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, on a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. When I hit a bug, a mystery — you’d try this and that, […]

Just said this to Claude: “This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you’d never hand off something so broken to your coding partner.” If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will […]

More and more I’ll realize that Claude doesn’t do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we’ve pre-arranged while I work. Sometimes it […]

1. I love puzzles. 2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions. 3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo). 4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo). 5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, […]

Everyone is introducing themselves on the Berkman community mail list, at the beginning of the fall semester, and here’s the story I am telling. Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04, worked on blogging, podcasting, RSS, political blogging and the connection to journalism. We had a couple of Bloggercons […]

After saying I was putting my tech work aside, yesterday, I had a bolt of determination, and realized I don’t like collaborating with Claude Code, but maybe it’s just when we get to this stage of a project where it’s all details, and they’re hard to communicate, and the bot has a bad habit of […]

A bunch of tech billionaires have chipped in a million each to fund a new Linux distribution. I can’t imagine how this is supposed to work, all those huge human egos, how much will they pay their developers to contribute what. I have to find out what the goal of the project is. It would […]

We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot.

The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky.

Understands.

Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. assume they consent. In the same way, the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive. The Democrats always put up with Republican tricks like this one. I’m sure McConnell would […]

Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI’s who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.

OPML archive for August 2026.