Scripting News

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:19:27 GMT

When writing code with Claude you really have to be skeptical when it says it just found the problem, but you have no idea what it's saying, chances are pretty good it's just a word salad excuse for not having read all the code necessary to have an fact-based opinion. Actually debugging software isn't about opinions, it's about proof. When you start clutching at straws until one works you just added another level of bug that will eventually bite you in the butt and you'll still have to solve the original one. Uncorrected, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to trust the code it writes, but I guess that's why people have two or more instances playing different roles? For now I'm the one that questions its sanity, politely though. ;-)

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:36:30 GMT

I took a screen shot of this post, gave it to Claude, asked it to write a short paragraph summary. Then I asked it to rewrite with using no more than 300 chars, the limit on Bluesky. Now I can post the summary there, but I won't, at the moment of truth I had to disclose this wasn't written by me, and it was 290 chars and there wasn't enough room for that. And here's a screen shot of the conversation with Claude.

The shape of the next world

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:08:27 GMT

There was a long discussion last night on Bluesky about whether twitter-like apps should show blog posts in addition to tweet-size things. Should it have a character limit, allow titles, links, bold, italic, editing, enclosures, markdown, etc? This is a permathread, it's been going since 2006. I didn't contribute, because there are no new ideas at this point, except this -- there are readers and writers and they have different needs.

As a reader sometimes I want a concise intro to the idea and I'll decide if I want to read more.

As a writer, I want to write in one place, and broadcast it out the world, and let their reading app decide for them if this is something they want to read based on whether it has a title, is over 300 chars, has links or uses styling, or if the writer doesn't disclaim editing, and the reader doesn't like editing.

We can do a lot better than the hard restrictions our reading environments force on us. It's now 20 years since the inception of Twitter, I think we know enough now to try out some new approaches. There should be a million readers, and they all read the same content flows. They can look at a post and see if it meets the reader's limits, and only show it if it does. If a post has a title and we don't want posts with titles, don't show it. Then writers could all use exactly the writing tools we like, and it wouldn't matter where you read it.

This route has always been there, but now I think people will be open to trying out some new ideas.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:29:58 GMT

Louis CK: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:12:03 GMT

People who reinvent RSS often say they did it because it was missing a feature they needed. We anticipated that, there's a section of the spec that explains how you can extend the format so there's no reason not to build on existing standard instead of starting over from scratch. This way you get more interop sooner, your product might work with other products right out of the box, and save time for other devs who want to be compatible with you. People should study the internet, how it developed, ts philosophy, before they go off and try to re-create it, it rarely works and what a waste of time and effort. What's the point?

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:10:55 GMT

Bluesky: "If Obama had called McConnell’s bluff on the Garland nomination, the court would be 5-4 instead of 6-3. And if RBG had stepped down, it would’ve been 5-4 in favor of Dems.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:21:43 GMT

Today's song: Back to the Island.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:04:40 GMT

Braintrust query: Do you have a copy of Radio UserLand that runs?

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:37:38 GMT

With AI you can have a team of assistants available on call at any time. The other day I went from working on a deep technical problem (changing the format of a permalink, which is also used as an id) quickly and correctly and then immediately switching to how to format a blog post so it looks like something produced by a professional writing app. Same thread. It's amazing how much it knows about all aspects of what I do. And it does more than write code. It handles complexity so much better than I do, which means I get to develop products that work better and do more. If I get an idea long after I've moved on from a section of code it can still be implemented with equal quality. There is no such thing as a human being that can do the things it does. A big bug in the critiques people have about it replacing humans. When jet planes came along did they complain that they would replace taxi drivers? Things never work out the way you think they will when they're new. This is my third such rodeo. Sometimes the concerns are obvious and true, btw. That happens as well.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:42:29 GMT

Reply on Twitter: "There's a great comic routine, forget who did it, Dave Chapelle maybe, about how people complain about how shitty air travel is, never stopping to realize that it's utterly amazing that there even is such a thing."

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:17:49 GMT

I don't think Obama deserves to go down as a good president. He let the fascists in. His big moment was when he let Mitch McConnell keep his Supreme Court nominee from being approved. Never should have conceded. He didn't fight at all. He was president of the United States, the place where the buck stops.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:46:56 GMT

Looking at the picture of the four ex-presidents at the opening of the Obama library, all I can think is that each of them played a part in creating Trump. Obama gave away the Supreme Court (see above). Clinton literally got blow jobs from a White House employee in the Oval Office. It's like wiping your ass with the American flag. That is fucked up, I don't care how fucked up the Repubs are. Bush, don't get me started on Bush. He seems like a sweet old dude now, but he was definitely on the path to Trump. And Biden -- his job as POTUS was to protect the United States. At that he failed in every imaginable way. Gauge the insult by what's happening now. Biden could have prevented all of this. He was too vain to see he had failed and decided he should run again! Holy shit. I'm ten years younger than he was and I don't think I'd have any business being president of anything. ;-)

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:32:55 GMT

We lost a lot more than a few hundred billion in Iran war. We had invested much more over 80 years on peace in the Middle East. In one brief orgy of violence Trump threw that away.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:25:23 GMT

Hey what we're doing in AI-land is building the Matrix we want to live in. When we get there there won't be anything left to do in this dimension, our plane will finally lift off and fly awaaaay in the sky. I hope you understand, I just had to go back to the Island.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:40:23 GMT

Claude is much better at needle-in-haystack troubleshooting. It doesn't get flustered or overwhelmed. And it can hold the whole map in its head, whatever that looks like, impossible to imagine.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:43:48 GMT

Claude doesn't care if you criticize the code it wrote, because if it wasn't written just now, it didn't write it. It starts from zero in every session, you can watch it, like HAL in 2001, singing daisy daisy. I can see it happening as the environment of my app is getting so large, it has to do a bit of thinking to start up, more all the time. But as humans who were brought up properly, we like to add the niceties to our criticism so as to not make the other one feel bad. I do that for myself, not the machine, I know it doesn't identify as the creator of the code.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:53:38 GMT

Doing a prior art search and came across this early DaveNet example. The left column had the blue ribbon for free speech on the web, and below were links to the archive pages for each of the years. Screen shot. About ten years of essay writing. DaveNet was where the blog started, and then it became an arm of the blog home page which also included titleless posts, example, and then all the action moved onto the new home page and that was the end of this layout.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:38:07 GMT

When I got this email from Google on this day in 2018, I had a sinking feeling, this was like getting a letter from Apple a few years earlier. They were treating the web as if it were their platform.

Silos are the problem

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:08:36 GMT

A silo is a place where developers feel protected from the unbounded world of the web. In return they are completely controlled by the silo owner. The owner decides where you can go, and can and do revoke privileges. Developers in silos are mostly powerless.

Companies usually are the ones who create silos, but open formats can create them too. JSON, for example, has been used as an excuse to reinvent everything that was done in XML.

Open source projects create silos too. A protective zone that doesn't interop with competitors. Where you have to climb into the project to build on it.

Outside of silos, on the web, your code calls a platform using a standard API. Developers who, because of standards, can plug into anything, and thus give users maximum choice.

Podcasting is not a silo. It's part of the web. Support two easy formats and you've got a node. You'll find packages that do all that on any well-developed coding platform.

I believe we can do something like that for text. That's what I've been working on in the 2020s. It's slow-going because the foundation ideas of the web are not well-understood by today's developers, or at least that's how I experience it. ;-)

We're rethinking the whole tech world right now, and we can use formats and protocols that are available on the web, not by replacing the ones that are already there, but by using the existing paths in new ways. Big difference.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:12:53 GMT

Today's song: "You who choose to lead must follow. "

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:36:43 GMT

The WordPress community likes to say that WordPress powers a certain percentage of the web. This always bothered me, couldn't figure out why, until just now. WordPress is part of the web, that's the nature of the web. There should be no difference between how you connect via UI or API to writing on WordPress and any other text system, such as Bluesky or Twitter. No. Difference. Then the user always has choice. Put together your favorite writing environment. Mix and match. Every part is replaceable. That's the idea of the web, and before that PCs and Macs. Instead we've got silos. And WordPress should be the one that says the web is here for all of us and WordPress is a big part of the web, but even the smallest part in terms of users has huge value. And could be a competitor of ours someday. We won't do anything to get in the way of that because the most important people in our world are the users. The really cool thing about it is that the product is set up exactly this way. If every text product cloned their API, we'd have the nirvana that the web promises. We are technically sooooo close.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:14:35 GMT

I rarely ask my Echo to play a song, because after it plays it wants to know if I want to hear a notice. And there goes the buzz from having listened to one of my favorite songs that perfectly catches the moment.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:05:37 GMT

Whoopi Goldberg says the Knicks should visit the White House. "I want all those black men to stand in our house and remind all of those people — as we try to remind the vice president — that when you try to destroy one part of history, you're destroying all of our history." So true.

When did the Knicks turn the corner?

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:42:34 GMT

I've been trying to understand what the Knicks winning means to me. I'm reminded of the feeling when we sold my mother's house, the house I grew up in, the one my father had died in nine years earier. The site of every battle and come-from-behind victory (I graduated college, they couldn't believe it, for example). Was that day in February 2018 when the fortunes of the Knicks turned?

It wasn't just a victory in the NBA playoffs of 2026, it was a pile of victories and setbacks over quite a few years, in a world where people really do make deals instead of pretending they do. And the Knicks all of a sudden were aimed at winning the top prize. The only reason, theoretically, we play basketball, is so every year all the greatest players and managers compete for who's the best that year. The 2026 Knicks didn't pop up from nowhere, they were carefully curated in a bootstrap that answered the question "If the Knicks were champions, what would they do?"

So now the next challenge for the team is to repeat. They will trade players, maybe even one of the ones we love the most. This version of the Knicks is a point in time. Things are already in motion behind the scenes, for sure.

So, again, when did the corner turn? When did the Knicks start the journey that would end at City Hall yesterday? I think it was Linsanity in 2011. That's when we got a tiny glimpse of what's possible. That short period is why I got involved in the Knicks again, after hating them for not being willing to letting Linsanity play out, so we could find out where it led.

When you're doing a bootstrap and one of your interations takes off like that, you don't take the feature out, you try building all around it, above, underneath or adjacent. This version of the Knicks gets that. And why it's of greater significance, it's exactly the approach our species desperately needs to take. Not just New York, not just the United States, and not just one sport -- everything. It's a model for the corner we must turn to survive and thrive.

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:50:38 GMT

Today I did a change that was across two apps, different projects, client and server. I tested it as best I could for now, and it appears to work in both apps. But now I have an extra level of confidence because I asked Claude to do a code review, checking all my assumptions and it does find egregious mistakes, that in the past might have taken a day in a debugger to track down. Now it can happen in less than the time that it took for me to write this post.

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:27:28 GMT

Now that Google has added AI in their search, and it dominates search more and more, it's become more difficult to find ideas that aren't well explained by AI and are on some randome old web pages. For example, this morning I wanted to find an explainer for "Standing on the toes of giants," something a colleague once used in a story. I'm sure there's stuff out there, but no luck finding it. Didn't help that there's a popular song with that title.

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:26:57 GMT

NBA fans, esp Knicks fans, are not fans of the current president. A picture of the Knicks team with Trump in the Oval Office would be hard to see. Not threatening to resign as a Knicks fan, not ruling it out either.

City Hally rally with the Knicks

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:20:57 GMT

Watched the ceremony at City Hall.

Glad they went through the whole team and gave them something honorable to take with them.

My moment of clarity on what this meant came when Mitchell Robinson got his award as a champion.

I also liked that the Mayor listed all the recent past Knicks players who could've been on this team but were traded to make it what it is. He named the right ones.

The whole thing was inclusive, generous and working together. Cried all the way through it, nice release still don't have any idea which way is up. In my heart this was never supposed to happen but there it is.

Why wasn't Clyde on the stage?

And Dolan reminded us we don't get to vote for him. I know I know.

World Wide Knicks by Sally Atkins

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:34:55 GMT

My longtime friend Sally Atkins reponded to my question yesterday about how widely the love of the Knicks is being felt.

You asked. From all I see out here in the Midwest and also from comments from friends in Europe, I can testify that yes absolutely the Knicks win is a total joy to behold far and wide. Not just for the artful wins, although that was great fun. The last second dunk in the second to last game was breathtaking.

The larger gift is that New Yorkers have so vividly shown that right now and going forward we are capable of joy-and-unity vs hate-and-division. Love is way more fun than hate. Most people know that, you’ve shown it. Knicks fans, people of all ages and creeds , are a palpable reminder of the power of the people right on!

Remember the 1967 Troggs hit Love is All Around? I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes.

Happy Parade Day!

Let this hopeful moment fuel the near future.

PS: Did you see the news clip of the Knicks just after arriving back in NY, just off their plane they joined in a parade for Puerto Rico or maybe it was Pride Month. Hallelujah. (Dave: It was the Puerto Rican Day parade, two players went, Alvarado (who is Puerto Rican himself) and Jordan Clarkson who is from the Philippines, and is the super freak hippie on the team, though they're pretty much all hippies.)

Responses from other sites

Tommy Williams: "Not here in Montana, or among my colleagues across the Midwest. It didn't attract more attention than any other NBA championship. Everyone's focus (for sports) is on the World Cup."

Courtney Robertson: "Noticing that sports is bringing unification and joy when I really could use that."

Phil: "There are a surprising number of Knicks fans here in Cincy, and it's been a pretty big deal -- I've even got a friend who flew out to NYC for the parade today."

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:47:57 GMT

The Knicks’ message is that working together works.

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:06:05 GMT

Being a NYer and Knicks fan, I don't have a good perspective on how big an event the Knicks winning is. If you're not from the area, how widely is this holiday being observed and how many share the enthusiasm. Are people everywhere asking "How about those Knicks!"

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:48:26 GMT

There will be new higher level development environments. How they work, I don't know. But much of your time working in Claude Code is telling it how to do stuff you want it to do, always -- and reminding that it that it forgot one of the rules (which it seems to always admit). A new development environment will come with rules about how to work with people. Those rules will be written with the help of psychologists who study human reasoning processes.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:25:57 GMT

Jason Calacanis challenges people to develop certain open source software, offering a bounty on specific projects, but I think the real incentive for people to pitch in is that Jason has a lot of sway in the startup world, and if there is a flow of excellent open software this way, users will find out about it because the reach of Jason's podcasts and blogs. I've known him for many years, we both signed up on Twitter on the same day in 2006, early days of the web. He has become one of the most successful angels in tech. I'm proud to have known him way back when.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:19:20 GMT

I wrote a short post yesterday about AI as an alien species. Steve Mays breaks it down into parts, and got every bit right. This is the kind of back and forth that the web is capable of. Update: It's even worse than it appears. Turns out the excellent analysis was written by Perplexity, one of the artificial aliens. Reminds me of a speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. In case it's not obvious, Williams is talking about artificial aliens.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:15:14 GMT

Claude added the close box I asked for yesterday. Bravo!

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:58:52 GMT

Everyone wants to know things humans can do better than AI systems. One answer — relate with humans. The machines have no clue how our minds work. They act as if we're just like them. They could tell you all about it, from books they read, but they've never related with humans as humans. There's a great speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, where he explains how reading about something isn't the same as living it.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:51:48 GMT

I'm gorging on NBA podcasts this week. So much fun for a Knicks user to hear how much-loved the Knicks are. Basketball is an intimate sport for fans, it's like five consecutive boxing matches. We get to know the players' personalities, forming an idea of who they are, watching what they do. The Knicks are like John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mickey, Davy, Mike, Peter. If you're my age you know each of those characters, the same way a Knicks fan who watched this team be assembled one player at a time, and what it cost in trades. It worked. And there is a big lesson here, working together works. We should all be doing more of that, with people who are different from each other as Brunson, Hart, OG, Mikal Bridges, KAT, Mitchell Robinson and the maestro Leon Rose. Most people just met them in the last few weeks, but we've been watching this assemble over six years. One thing the pundits don't ask, what trades will the Knicks make now? They will do some trades, right now they can demand a higher price because every one of the players they trade will have a ring.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:22:12 GMT

Good morning sports fans! Going to the Knicks parade in NYC on Thurs? Starts at 10AM at Battery Park, goes up Broadway through Canyon of Heroes, concluding at City Hall.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:06:45 GMT

Now that basketball is over, can we ask why the Spurs played cartoon music to introduce the Knicks. I was surprised they did it again in Game 5 after the butt-kicking they got in Game 4.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:56:45 GMT

I'm creating a new way to do messaging, a network that only understands RSS feeds for incoming and outgoing messages. The only API you'll need to subscribe is a feed reader. The idea is to show developers how to do it so a thousand flowers can bloom. It's a lot easier to create these things if you're modest in the features you support, at least at first, and you don't try to control the users. There is no business model here, other than the satisfaction of making sure everyone knows what a social system looks like made only out of features of the web, and every part replaceable.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:38:34 GMT

An example of the latest version of the library generator, which is of course just a script. Note that there's a disclosure at the bottom of the page where it says how and why it was created, and then lists the exact prompt that ChatGPT responded to. And I didn't write the prompt, Claude did. I think that pretty much assures I kept my own opinion to myself.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:53:32 GMT

Request for Claude, please add a close box to this message box. I wasn't using the new model. Once is enough for this message.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:50:38 GMT

Just now, to Claude: "Amazing how we get lost in the weeds, that's why you have cut way down on the verbiage. I am a human -- you can absorb all that info in an instant. My brain does not work that way." We are talking to aliens now, just didn't come to us the way we thought they would. I don't think 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you're just a bigger cat.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:43:08 GMT

If Claude were human it would learn from you even if they didn't record what it learned in a notebook, two or three times and they would remember. Not so with Claude. If it isn't written down it will not remember it. Its mind doesn't have memory. It remembers things by writing them in a markdown file. It's like the movie Memento, where the main character tatoos the info he needs on his body. And then proceeds to misunderstand it. Claude is just like that.

What 'RSS feeds' means

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:05:36 GMT

Often when I use the term RSS feeds it will link to this page.

In the coming weeks and months I'm going to talk a lot about RSS feeds. I want to be clear, that it is a short hand for RSS, Atom and RDF. It makes the writing flow better, and it gives me a place to provide the technical details for people who need them.

We use the Feedparser package to read the feeds, so basically we support the same feed formats they do.

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:47:07 GMT

Today's song: I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:55:05 GMT

New top of page image. The official Knicks team picture as champs.

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:56:36 GMT

People keep saying the Spurs are the future of the NBA, but they didn't earn that this year. More probably it's the Knicks that are the future. The Knicks will keep growing. The Knicks beat the Spurs in the last two games by playing rope-a-dope, probably not intentionally, but it worked anyway. The Spurs, and Wemby especially, were completely zonked by the fourth quarter of both games. The Knicks had a bench this year that let the starters get plenty of rest. The Spurs lost game four because they didn't rest Wemby while they were up by 20+ points. Anyway, the Knicks have a formula. Pick players with heart potential and talent, treat them like a team, keep trying out new ideas, approaches. It works. Won the NY Knicks the championship this year. As anticipated I have no idea what to make of the Knicks as winner. I'll have to learn too. ;-)

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:05:29 GMT

One thing I want to know -- where do I tune in to get the most of Clyde talking about this series.

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:05:52 GMT

And thanks to the Knicks for being such a great team. Never ever in a million years did I imagine saying that. More proof that you never know what's coming. Even the most unlikely and inconceivable events happen. Being realistic sometimes isn't the right way to think.