FeedCity

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned: These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer. News Publisher has little […]⌥ Permalink

Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScrip...

Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage that kept me from getting anywhere. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, actually without breaking anything.

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know […]

An even-better-than-usual essay by the invaluable J. B. Crawford: [Brigadier Martin Hotine’s] greatest memorial is an artifact of his work: squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate. Found atop mountains and hills throughout the United Kingdom, these "tr...

Ezra Klein: This is, I guess, the point in the column where I should call for everyone to abandon X. I have not posted regularly there in years, and I’d urge others to limit their use as well. Nor have I taken up BlueSky or Threads. I find that much time spent on any of the...

Mark Helprin to the technocrats in 1996: The revolution that you have made is indeed wonderful, powerful, and great, and it has hardly begun. But you have not brought to it the discipline, the anticipation, or the clarity of vision that it, like any vast augmentation in the...

Indie Web Is Punk — I am putting a link to this manifesto on all my sites, trying to spread the good news: You don’t have to live on the big platforms, suffering their relentless enshittification. You have a better option.  

Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S...

Favorited Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter by Wouter Groeneveld (Brainbaking) This type of thing is always highly fascinating to me. Using artefacts, here 17th century letters that survived to present day by happenstance and thus not having been delivered, to say something about life in those times, habits, language, and rituals. Now try and imagine […]

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

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Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters: The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters. The...

BTW the codename for the new version of Frontier is Atlantis. And we refer to the old version as Berkeley. I'm getting used to the first one. I liked it as an idea, but I don't like typing it, because for some reason my mind has trouble remembering it. Maybe this is just age creeping up on me. Atlantis.

This project has been pre-occupying me, I wasn't planning on doing this, I was going to turn my attention to FeedLand immediately after finalizing RSS.chat. After running the experiment that proved it could be done, I looked at the two choices: 1. Move forward on creating a social network built only out of the existing web with all parts replaceable, small pieces loosely joined. Or 2. Give new life for Frontier, which is my life's work, even though very few people know about it. It's the reason were able to move so fast on blogging, RSS, podcasting, outliners, etc. A very highly leveraged development and runtime environment. Imho far ahead of anything else. The ideas may possibly now have a way forward. When I put those two items next to each other there was no question, I had to go with bringing Frontier back to something people can use.

I think what confused Claude is that we're implementing the odb as a SQLite database. And when you look at a table, you're looking at the result of a query. Previous versions of Frontier implemented the odb as a hash table, that could contain scalars, objects and other tables...

Are there any other people who are blogging daily about their experiences developing software with Claude Code, Codex or somesuch. I'd like to add them to a list where we follow them. So much innovation happening underneath, I want to hear about what people are learing about creating the next layers.

I think Radiohead are a brilliant band, but I can’t listen to most of their music for more than two or three minutes at a time without having to turn it off because it is painful to me to listen to. Their records are engineered in ways (especially the extreme compression) that I can’t physically handle. I have been frustrated by this for decades, and keep going back to their music to see if my response has changed, but so far: Nope.

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

My colleagues Davide and Colleen Zori keep discovering intact Etruscan chamber tombs. Remarkable.