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Friday, September 4, 2026 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, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the fix. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should not put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh. # It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Wa...

Thursday, September 3, 2026 Why I love programming # 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, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it). # 6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony. # I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get ...

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot . # 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 be nice to have a Linux that was extensively tested for use by regular people. # 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 ignoring things I tell it to do. It also returns code to me to test that no human developer would pass on to a user. It would be too embarrassing. But the bot isn't aware in the same wa...

Tuesday, September 1, 2026 The blogging tools for Bluesky should be able to publish on Bluesky. # 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 appreciate the utility of his death, and the Republican lack of shame. Anything for a buck. # 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. # If you View Source on a fatpage , scroll to the bottom, you'll see the code. Example . The idea is t...

Monday, August 31, 2026 Fatpages . I'm working on a code release that's on the path to Frontier. It reads and writes fatpage files, a format we invented for releasing new and updated parts for Frontier in 1997. So this is very old but perfectly useful technology that's being built in a new release of Frontier, the first in 1.5 decades, depending on how you count years and forks. # Claude Code is like Victor Wembanyama , assuming you follow the NBA and are interested in my first-hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so. # I've been watching The Pitt , but it can be a bit much, so I went looking for something a bit lighter, and found 9 to 5 on Amazon Prime. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are the stars, and Dolly's famous song with the same name is the theme. It's a perfect slice of the world I grew up in. I get it confused with Working Girl which came out eight years later, wi...

Sunday, August 30, 2026 I've been watching Season 1 of The Pitt , and as its reviews said, it's great drama, and there are lots of episodes. I like shows like this because they're simulated communities, we come to know the characters, and think about them even when we're not watching. Before too long we'll have AI programming that makes these shows like software, the stories assemble around the characters, and then are generated the same way ChatGPT generates the art we call slop, which will someday not be a pejorative the same way sick and junk aren't negative terms today. So we'll be able to call up new episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos or The Pitt any time we like. We'd be missing the fun of discussing the latest episode with friends, or maybe we'll have bot-invented friends too who will simulate having watched the episode you just watched, which leads us to another masterpiece of entertainment, The Matrix . On the oth...

Saturday, August 29, 2026 An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed. # Linkblog items for the day The Freeway That Saved the Hills. sjl.us Trump Steps Up Stunts as U.S. Midterms Loom. politicalwire.com How to Claw Back Wealth From Toppled Autocrats. theatlantic.com Jon Ossoff Gives Donald Trump a 4-Word Nickname as Fun Intensifies. yahoo.com Copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer. This email was sent on: 8/30/2026, 12:00:01 AM Eastern. "You can observe a lot by watching." This blog has been running for: 31 years, 10 months, 22 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes, 1 second. How to subscribe . Read on the web . Click here to unsubscribe.

Friday, August 28, 2026 I am juggling two Frontiers now, one the last release of the OPML editor from 2014, and the other the in-development version codenamed Atlantis that runs in Electron and thus is built on JavaScript and Chrome. Took me a while to get over the confusion, because Frontier is actually a product that contains other products and the common layers they need to be on the web. And I just realized I may not need Electric Drummer, because Atlantis uses the same outliner as Drummer. I was stockpiling all these Node packages and user interface stuff that now is relevant in the uber-framework, the one I aimed to spend the rest of my life working in. Well maybe it'll turn out that there was just a 12 year vacation? It's all very confusing and all my carts are turning over, all the assumptions change. My goal is to get this wonderful product running on my new Mac laptop I currently mainly use for email. I bought it to give reality to the idea of getti...

Thursday, August 27, 2026 Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast , he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history. # FeedLand Rivers for WordPress : I've noticed that people are setting up news reader sites with FeedLand that are getting considerable flow. We thought they'd use News Products, a feature that was supposed to make it easy to create standalone sites like the one I did for WordPress insiders . But people aren't going that way, they're just sharing the URLs they read their own sites with. Here's an example from my own FeedLand world. This works because you don't have to be logged in to read FeedLand, just to subscribe. The...