聊搜 - 文章聚合搜索

Friday, August 21, 2026 Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols, but here's the thing Claude didn't get and probably still hasn't gotten -- there's code in there to support all that stuff. How else do you think it came about? People just did what we said to do? At Google? Apple? Microsoft? And on and on. They supported this stuff so they could interop with us and steal our users (which is a fine reason to interop, probably the only real reason). I was trying to think of a metaphor that expresses the difference between Frontier and languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. It's like a ski mountain. The languages are trails on the mountain. But there aren't any lifts, lodges, no ski patrol, lessons. And because...

Thursday, August 20, 2026 Just listened to a podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called Slings & Arrows . She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available on YouTube . # Had a breakthrough with Claude this morning re how builtin verbs have no special powers in Frontier. It's why we were able to build glue first for the truly builtin stuff, then over Apple Events on the Mac, then HTTP, XML-RPC, the Metawebolog API and on and on, all of this were perfectly simple to add to the language, you didn't need anyone's permission to do anything. I understand why Python and JavaScript try to separate the boys from the men, the priests from the peasants, the little startups from the BigCo's, but the design of the Frontier system came at it from a different point of view. Make it easier. Claude had the sour...

Wednesday, August 19, 2026 I wonder how many scenarios they're playing out in DC wrt Iran. Just guessing, probably none. We learned on Monday that the real war has yet to begin, according to Iran. What could they do to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. We think the cost of war is higher prices. We are not safe in the US, any more than Russians are safe in Moscow. The parallels are pretty amazing. Both Russia and the US started unprovoked wars of choice, and clearly didn't consider that they might get bogged down. Russia has a source of drones so they can fight back. But I'd be surprised if Trump is stocking up, but if we were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. Did a lot of damage, killed civilians, decimated their government, they keep going. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and what asymmetric war is like. The US always falls for this. Our military is very...

Tuesday, August 18, 2026 I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat . It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed. # Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end...

Monday, August 17, 2026 Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing. # Linkblog items for the day Howard Rheingold has an archive of his career as a writer and thinker...

Sunday, August 16, 2026 Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NetNewsWire . I have a fairly detailed response , that says dynamic OPML is the way to go. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS , InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a podcast client to work here. I've pitched a few of them. Will continue. # Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. # Linkblog items for the ...

Saturday, August 15, 2026 Thinking out loud on a Saturday morning # Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away. # I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations . When I see a product that fits in with what I'm doing my first impulse is how do we connect them? This is one of the basic great things about computers and our networks. But there must be interop between people before there can be interop between products. # Connecting two pieces of tech is mostly mathematics, code writing, not very much in the way of manufacturing, whereas in the physical world two train lines can cross each other but can't connect because they have different rail spacing , or run on a different kind of fuel. In software if there's a huge difference like that you can make a software bridge, as they did with TCP...

Friday, August 14, 2026 I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook , and hope to preserve it via the search feature here. # I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the news, literally. I thought maybe they had a vision beyond the usual dotcom slop. Not so fast. Your friends can't read the articles unless they become a registered user. I bet they always had that, but this time I read the smaller print. Why can't some company do something just for goodwill and free advertising, without such an obvious business model? Having people t...

Thursday, August 13, 2026 WordPress as the text of the web # I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words. # Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a simple normal writing interface, and a great API for competitive apps. That's the big opportunity you all can't see for some reason. # Once you have that, you can now move WordPress into position as the text of the web. And it has the market all to itself because the other text apps of the web place ridiculous constraints on text. # They got this idea in their heads that the web would be better if they eliminated all the writers features. Maybe that's because they weren't writers. ;-) # I know this is a story I repeat often. The opportunity is still there. All kin...