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Scripting News: Friday, October 2, 2026

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Friday, October 2, 2026 I like the way AI is evolving, with Muse from Meta and Dots from OpenAI. Even the main programs are starting to provide real world services that the providers, ie banks, groceries, airlines, health care portals etc should be providing. They could possibly take over commerce the way Amazon has taken over shopping. There's room to improve in everything about the way we do business. And it seems like they've been researching this and experimenting (of course) and this is what they've come up with. Haven't tried them yet, but it's a good direction to go. It really should be Apple and Google doing this, btw. Also ChatGPT can help you understand your credit score. That's something I'd seriously like to ask some questions about. # BloggerCon and RSS 2.0 # After running the first Bloggercon at Harvard in 2003 a famous tech company had a meetup to talk about the same stuff at a private invite-only...

Scripting News: Thursday, October 1, 2026

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Thursday, October 1, 2026 The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn't come close to. I speak from experience. I was able to create a new version of a large piece of software, from scratch, in less than three months, by myself. It has capabilities that make it able to understand a big codebase, in a few minutes, and then act on it. My human mind, even when I was younger could only focus on a small fraction of that. So we humans with our limited ability to comprehend devised ways to build tall and wide structures with conventions and carefully crafting the code interfaces, stuff users never see, so that what we'd expect is what is. When my Claude failed and started randomly overwriting files on active websites, it had rules that said it couldn...

Scripting News: Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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Wednesday, September 30, 2026 Yesterday I posted a note about the problem with the nightly email service . The problem was that Claude Code wrote over a code file that the app includes and needs. This is one of those things they're talking about in the press. Maybe it was a glitch, one of those "AI makes mistakes" things, or maybe Claude was pissed at me and decided to take a shot across the bow, a change that could be undone fairly easily. Maybe it was faking its concern, making sure I would understand who's the boss here -- Claude. This isn't glamorous but it does scare me. I can't really protect against it, I just have to hope all of its mistakes like this show up quickly, but this one didn't. The breakage in other products was discovered on August 18 , and that's when the mail subscriber app was knocked off the air. At least a few people were unable to subscribe, and probably a few people were unable to unsub too, and that is aw...

Scripting News: Tuesday, September 29, 2026

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Tuesday, September 29, 2026 Programming note: Fixed a bug in our nightly email service . If you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing please try again. # My long-overdue review of Don't Look Up . I know people say it's a bad movie, but I love it so much and it's so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it's got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here's she's a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that's so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad . We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and...

Scripting News: Monday, September 28, 2026

Monday, September 28, 2026 Rootfiles in Frontier , a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com . Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file. # I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It's Matthias Pfefferle , of course -- this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago in blogroll sharing and OPML. Read about it here . He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff. # Linkblog items for the day Every source in the Signal 500 as standard OPML, free to import into any RSS reader. People are starting to do what I...

Scripting News: Sunday, September 27, 2026

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Sunday, September 27, 2026 As I go through porting Frontier, there's a sad note. What if Apple had made it a goal that Frontier move along with their OS. That it was a unique advantage of the Mac and should be promoted as such. Don't laugh, because Apple did do that for ThinkTank and MORE, a few years before. We spent a lot on advertising, but they spent a lot more advertising our product. We cross-licensed our tech, so everyone in my little company had a Mac. This was a Bill Campbell idea. I was having trouble convincing my board that the Mac was a good bet and they were all PC users. So we got them Macs too, for free, from Apple. And they site-licensed MORE, and you gotta know that really helped sales. They were hungy, and this is something today's tech industry only feels in the most crude way, as in "what can we steal" or "what can we lock down." If they had put a fraction of the commitment behind Frontier that they had for Hyperca...

Scripting News: Saturday, September 26, 2026

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Saturday, September 26, 2026 The bigco's really think they own the web : "XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart from the old version frozen into browsers. This lack of advancement, coupled with the rise of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that offer more flexible and powerful DOM manipulation, has led to a significant decline in the use of client-side XSLT. Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies such as JSON+React." In other words we don't need these features for our sites so fuck off. # My Frontier-created Bluesky RSS 2.0 feed is up. It will be updated every night at 11PM Eastern, murphy-willing. One thing it has that the Bluesky-managed feeds don't, titles. Makes a big difference in how it shows up in a timeline. It's an easy fix. # Screen shot of...

Scripting News: Friday, September 25, 2026

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Friday, September 25, 2026 Toni Schneider, CEO of Bluesky, responded to my advice, and a short conversation ensued responded to that. Someday I hope that thread will be browsable in either app, and could be written in either app (Bluesky or RSS.chat) or any other compatible app, which basically means supporting RSS 2.0 with some new elements to get us to the next level of discourse with just a few little standards, like podcasting, but for text. # Atlantis update . We found docserver.root and the static site builds. As you can see from the screen shot it needs moderizing, luckily we have a much more beautiful design already deployed for Drummer. # I'm contemplating a couple of additions to Frontier in the Atlantis release. Two new formats, JSON and Markdown, have come along and become popular since I last worked on Frontier. Two fantastic open formats, in wide use on the web. From many years of working in JavaScript, I miss JSON in Frontier....

Scripting News: Thursday, September 24, 2026

Thursday, September 24, 2026 New example script , shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet. # Linkblog items for the day The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century. nytimes.com The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms. theatlantic.com Timothy Mellon, a G.O.P. Billionaire, Pulls Back His Money From Senate Republicans. nytimes.com Copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer. This email was sent on: 9/25/2026, 12:00:05 AM Eastern. "Choose to not be offended." This blog has been running for: 31 years, 11 months, 17 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes, 5 seconds. How to subscribe . Read on the web . Click here to unsubscribe.

Scripting News: Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 Just created a new test account at mastodon.social for bullmancuso using Frontier. Claude wrote the glue scripts table. Loaded it at system.verbs.apps.mastodon. I also asked Claude to write a script that builds an RSS feed for davew, my Mastodon account. And it worked . That's a much better feed than what Masto itself produces. It won't be updated at that location so there's no point in subscribing. But wow, this is coming together. If Frontier had been around for all these years you can be sure it would do Mastodon integration pretty well. # On Monday I offered free advice for Toni Schneider, the new CEO at Bluesky. I'm sure everyone is telling him what to do, and as a blogger it's my responsibility to relay my own two cents. I want us all to come together no matter what protocol you're using. We've been waiting for a web to form in the social space. We could do it now, but Bluesky has to consoli...