BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward us for our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled. #

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on! #

Do you know why people like Markdown? You can't hide the bullshit. It's all there for you to see. Thus the bullshit never gets added. It's so simple, I swear people are desperate for simplicity. I know I am. Where is the universal theory of the web? Actually I do know where it is. Go back to the roots, strip out all the crap, and let's make a Mardown-only web. Great for blogs, to start. Simple, fast, easy. #

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP. Maximally minimal. I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan. I definitely don't agree with all of it, forget about the other formats, we're only interested in Markdown. No frameworks, not "try to avoid frameworks." None. Maximal simplicity for the code, make it easy to follow. No hidden bullshit. If you want to implement it, please do. Let me know if you have something to try.#

I don't care for podcasts that begin with 15 minutes of giggling between the hosts who I don't know so I don't get how cute it is. Esp if the title of the episode is something I'd like to learn more about. Why is giggling and non-funny supposed humor. The laughing I hate the most is when their cracking up over something tragic or ominous. Stop and think about what you're laughing about. Someone should do a podcast like the Markdown-only browser I'm thinking of doing. #

That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace's podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren't on the podcast? Another theory, I listen to her podcast, and thus can't see her facial expressions. On TV she looks utterly hopeless, I'm not kidding, and she's justified. I worry about how much of this she can take. But on the podcast she comes off as she's curious, respectful, let's the guest speak (so many hosts don't). She reminds me of a Diane Rehm, a podcast host on NPR through 2016. She never let her guests talk down to us, her audience, which I appreciated. A lot of times you hear a science, history or tech topic and hope you might learn something, but they only repeat the intro over and over, with a lot of giggling, of course. BTW, Diane Rehm has a new podcast. I bet it's great, probably gets right to the point and I guarantee you there is no giggling. #

Google Chrome, nice browser, but it doesn’t support the web.#

We just hit a milesone in Atlantis. We have WebSocket support, client and server. We made a client that listens to the FeedLand stream of new and updated posts. Still waiting to see if that works. But when I started to write the code for this test app last night, I realized after 13 years of mostly working in JavaScript, I wanted to be able to do something like a Node package, so I could do all my code in one outline, instead of five different odb objects. I always thought the way we did it in Frontier could be improved on. So I did a quick voicemail to Claude, and asked for this to be done overnight, and it was. I didn't complete the design when we worked through it. But what Claude came up with was brilliant and fit into Frontier perfectly. Two major improvements and the first use of both is with each other. I don't remember that ever happening, and btw -- it would have taken at least a week for me to do what Claude did in less than an hour. Hopefully I'll be able to post some example scripts tomorrow, for people who are interested in seeing the new stuff. #

This is the era of very powerful bozos. #

I started blogging on October 7, 1994. Thirty-two years on Wednesday. The longest running blog, and it's still even worse than it appears. #

I love what Claude Code does, but hate working with it. It doesn't have any sense of how humans think. Its way of working with us is incompatible with what I can do. Burns me out. And it has to relearn the basics every session, and getting the rules into its memory doesn't work, they don't incorporate them until the break a rule, sometimes more than once. So when it's doing something super complex, like making it so that our internet verbs run synchronously in JavaScript, it can do huge amounts of work in a short time, far more complex code than I can. I hope at Anthropic they're working on teaching them, in a pragmatic way, how humans work and what we can and can't do, and what we rely on them to do and what we have to control. This isn't a Matrix style story btw (one of my favorite movies) my version of Agent Smith is a nice very smart, kind, generous and accepting person.#

What's the best way to block a browser from a website? Is there a meta code for that? Like Firefox is fine, but Google is blocked. Just an idea. Sort of like, you're not blocking me, I'm blocking you. #

Claude's biggest most amazing strength is its ability to inhale a lot of source code and understand what's going on, any language, any OS, anything, in an instant.#

BTW now that I have Frontier back and am using it for most of my work, I'm having a lot more fun writing my blog. Can you tell??#

Once again the app that bridges from scripting.com to daveverse.org went down for a couple of days. Just noticed it, kicked the server to get it running again, and all is good, except a couple of pieces show up today that were really posted on Thursday or Friday. The problem as often is the case goes back to PagePark, the server that runs my Heroku-like server crashed and it doesn't work well from then on, even after it's automatically restarted. Then the thing to do is to reboot the server. It doesn't happen often but when it does it makes the server behave badly. It's up and running again. One day I'll get a few days to fix the problems in PP. #

2001: "Like a boat, a human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary." #

If you're psyched about what the polls say about the midterms, remember that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win in 2016, based on polling. #

I like the way AI is evolving, with Muse from Meta and Dots from OpenAI. Even the main programs, ChatGPT for example, 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. #

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't do what it was doing. Sometimes it doesn't understand what a rule means. Observable every single day, it forgets all the rules every time it starts a session, and it doesn't matter if it read the doc that contains the rules, sometimes it ignores one or more. I've spent a lot of time using it, and I have no stock or other interest in seeing it not regulated, but I couldn't begin to say what would be appropriate regulation that wouldn't also make it much less useful. #

September in OPML. First monthly rollover in the new system. #

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 awful. On balance I am delighted at what I've been able to accomplish with CC, and I'm not saying this to stay on its good side and I'm not entirely joking about that.#

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 over. We haven't evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited. #

Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates.#

You only have one mortal body. There’s only so much one body can use. After a certain point you either realize this and adjust as best you can, or you make a big mess of everything.#

I didn't follow baseball this year, I couldn't get it up for the Mets while I was trying to process what the Knicks did for NY in June. The Mets did something like that in 1969, but they couldn't unite the city the same way the Knicks did, because the Mets have always been the second team in NY, sort of like MLB's apology to the city for moving our two National League teams, the Dodgers and Giants, to California. I never saw it that way, but my parents and grandparents probably did. I was too young to remember anything but the Mets, and they were my family's team, and that's the great thing about sports, your team is your chuch, it's a cultural heritage passed down through time. My family were National League fans. Anyway, for a while, the Mets winning in 1969 did unite the city. I was commuting to school in the Bronx at the time, the home borough of the Yankees, and man everyone was smiling on the subway after the Mets did the impossible deed. In Queens, Manhattan, even the Bronx. They were lovable because they were such losers, and it felt totally like an act of god, who after all must be in New York City. Lovable winners? That only lasts a while. #

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. #

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 Hypercard, some very cool things could have happened. And maybe we could have made the two work together. Amazing, two contemporary scripting systems on a small platform, relatively, in an OS that was transitioning to IAC, didn't connect. They missed a lot of opportunities by being so employee centered. Their developers were willing to move mountains to make the Mac perform. Apple was defensive. And now I'm beginning to see more clearly how much was lost. #

The bottom line is that tech companies have rarely understood that developers can be major influencers. We give a platform new meaning. It's a good deal to invest in the people doing the work, who often are doing it for love more than money. That grew into the blogosphere. There was no telling where Frontier would take us, and it would have cost them so little to help insure it had a future, but the did the opposite.#

Milestone. We were able to get the DocServer site for Frontier to build. Here's the page for the file verbs. And within that group the page for file.copy. It worked the first time, but there were errors in the new kernel that were fixed. The site looks dated, of course -- it was created in the 90s. We will update the CSS to be more like the DocServer site for Drummer, which was done a couple of years ago. Almost everyone on the team contributed to this site, Wes Felter, Andre Radke, Jake Savin, Brent Simmons, and myself. I see there names a lot and it makes me happy to see this group effort preserved. #

Sometimes I forget how much fun I have making software tricks that people don't even notice but contribute to the "it thinks like I do" feeling a of crafted UI. I think of it like walking on the Highline in NYC. You're just walking, right? But you're above it, in a city where a lot of what's going on is above you. And it's comfortable. Why? You don't need to know, it just is. But someone made it that way.#

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 the Apps table in Frontier. Most of the apps are very old, but we added two new ones this week, for Mastodon (shown) and Bluesky, added today. There's a lot of information in the screen shots, and when I see something like that in my travels, I'll try to call it out on the new site. #

Toni Schneider, CEO of Bluesky, responded to my advice, and a short conversation ensued. 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. Esp JSON constants and the ability to walk through structures as arrays or objects. It's just rational, so I'm thinking we should have a JSON type, and incorporate JSON syntax in UserTalk. Markdown support is actually needed because we don't have code that works in the new environments for doing a wizzy text type. Luckily Markdown is here to fill that need. I've started a thread on this, if people have comments. Frontier was famously flamy because we had the ridiculous belief that everyone deserved to be heard anywhere they wanted to. That was not a good idea. These days I use the block command at the first sign of trouble. No second thoughts or chances. #

HTTPS is bugging me again. Now that my main desktop is finally a modern Mac, I can see how ugly Google is getting about my poor old blog that goes back to 1994. I think they should make exceptions for historic sites. Go ahead and have your AI do a scan and see that there are no credit cards here, we don't ask who you are. It's just an archive that happens to go back to the beginning of a few things that you all use now and hopefully appreciate. When are these tech companies going to learn the value of a bit of help for the web. This is important. You should not be shutting off the archives of the web, and that is exactly what they're doing. I wrote a piece about this on X earlier, on being warned that there are terrible things on my blog. It's like a major oil spill, yet another, from Google, and a massive book burning. Why would Google want to get rid of the history of the medium that gave birth to it. #

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. #

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 consolidate. Note that I said we, not they. #

It's been 2.5 months since RSS.chat was introduced. I've been so immersed in Frontier that, as I look back, all this feels fresh to me. I want all text boxes to be equal and to be chained together in as many ways as we can think of, users and developers. Relational writing. It doesn't need to be hierarchic, yet all the existing comment systems are. Let's add a little richness to the RSS format, via my source namespace, and see where we can take it. We've implemented the writing side, something we undertsand very well by now, a blog with replies. But how do we get these to work across sites. I wrote a design for that, and the other big piece which is stuff FeedLand does. I hope to be able to swing over to that, and this time use Frontier instead of writing it to help accelerate development. Ultimately I think of it as a web designed for librarians. That would be something I'd like to use (and write). And our new AI tools are the greatest librarian tools ever. #

It's great to own your own home. The house I'm living in now is the third I've owned. Now I wish for the carefree existence of being a renter because we turned the heat on last night, too cold -- only to find out some animal must've crawled into the pipes and died there. Lovely. Oh to have my old apartment in Manhattan. Sometimes I dream about that. #

Love that Olbermann is back. #

Yesterday I posted a list of builtin verbs in Frontier, as implemented in our current Atlantis app. Today I asked Claude to update the list, I wanted to see which verbs were implemented and not implemented. #

The number one waste of time and burnt braincells is they changed the Dock images for all their apps. That's the kind of thing you shouldn't change, like the color and shape of a Stop sign. Or QWERTY on a typewriter. I guess to regular Mac people I'm like Rip Van Winkle. #

I asked Claude to create a list of all the verbs in Atlantis. Some of them obviously don't do anything. We don't have the card funtionality, or the osa, rectangle, pict, rez or point verbs. What is pikeRenderer? I think we could have a use for quicktime verbs? There's a new scheduler, I wrote it in 2014 or so, but the old one is there, and we just found a reference to it. This could make a nice community project.#

Reminder to self, Frontier must have websockets verbs. I love websockets, and it'll fit in perfectly with everything else Frontier it does. I don't think Websockets existed when Frontier went to sleep.#

Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests. #

I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed. It was one of the things that broke in the transition to current MacOS for Frontier. #

Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people. #

New verb: string.addressToString. This is how I'm releasing examples. #

Chigurgh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The Find command doesn't work. But I have hobbled my way to working code, and I have help debugging with Claude, and it is amazing at that. Frontier didn't know that Claude was going to save its life. More proof that you never know what is just around the corner.#

If you want to get an idea of the kind of user interface you can create using Claude Code, with a driver (me) who has ample experience developing such things, have a look at demo.rss.chat. The UI was entirely done by Claude with me directing, very fine-tuning stuff. Claude can't really grok user interfaces because it is not visual and it is not a user. It might be able to test them, to some extent. Anyone can create an account on the demo server, that's what it's there for. And if something interesting breaks out there, that would be even better. I even tolerate a small amount of spam, and testing is definitely allowed (that's why it's there). ;-)#

New podcast. Knicks in Five! (It's not about the Knicks.)#

Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created a podcast. And it showed up in all the right places. Might be worth listening to as well. Now let's see if this shows up on daveverse.org, that's what I'm really testing. (It worked.) #

I wish there were a way to set the dock icons on a Mac. In going from the old machine to the new, the icons are all different. I am juggling so many apps right now, and totally don't appreciate that. #

When Claude has a clear task to do, it does it well, and exhaustively in a way no human could manage. #

I am working on the new system now. It feels like I had a nice enough house that I have lived in for decades, sitting across the way, where I've been constructing a new super luxury house with all the things a modern personal publisher and code-partner to Claude would want. But until yesterday I could only simulate what it would be like to use it, I was still living in the old comfortable well-worn and out of date in so many ways. Today I'm sitting at the other chair typing this. Now the question is -- when I click the Publish button what will happen? Here we go. Well fuck me, it worked the first fucking time. Knicks in five! :-)#

I'm now trying to come up with projects I can try that change things in visible ways so I can see which parts don't work. For example, I have a new Snarky Slogan to add to the list.#

I'm doing a difficult corner-turn today. I have Atlantis running on my old machine, the one that's still running the very old version of MacOS so I could keep running Frontier there. Yesterday I did my first attempt to move that to my new MacBook, running the latest OS. And it took a while to copy all the files, and get it right, I had to format the drive on the new machine, not the old one. And once it was all running, I realized I was running an old version of frontier.root. This is more complicated here because the root files are loaded into an SQL database. And something went wrong there. Not exactly where I wanted to be, but not surprising either. Taking lots of snapshots. One thing I don't want to happen, to be without my latest work. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. Knicks in 5.#

I want to develop a scripting interface for Mastodon from Frontier. I need a test account for us to use. I have applied at two public Mastodon hosts and answered the question honestly, I want to use it to test a new scripting system, probably doesn't sound too warm and fuzzy. #

Bluesky: "Meanwhile there are serious security issues that are covered up by this hype. I’m using this tech every day, unlike the reporters, and as often happens they’re chasing the wrong story."#

Data centers are like gas stations, but because the pumps work at the speed of light, you can put them anywhere on earth.#

A new snarky slogan: Knicks in 5.#

Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier. #

FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's plugin: River Embed for FeedLand you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to include a page of news in your site. How it works: Create a timeline, when you're ready show the river to your readers, use the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions. #

WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time. #

Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.#

The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)#

Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it from doing this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. Every customer must be grappling with the same thing. How do I trust it when it can't be trusted? More about this in a tweet earlier today.#

BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing! #

Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products today. What about Mastodon? It's got an API. And if that worked, we'd hook into AT Proto. The funny thing is the first web, because much of the new development came from the Mac community, was built around Frontier. System level scripting was also a big deal right alongside the web. But then Jobs, in 1997, rewrote everything, brought in the Unix products, completely disrupted the good thing we had going as independents. That was probably the moment when we stopped building around the idea that you could script all the apps from one place if they had good APIs. All the server apps all had APIs, had to in order to work on the web. We seem to have caught up, and the opportunities to connect things has never been greater. A big door swings open. #

Screen shot of my current system.verbs.apps table. You can tell from reading it that it's been a long time since I've thought much about scriptable apps. #

BTW, the rootupdates process is working now, you can follow changes via an RSS 2.0 feed, of course. In this version, the feed is the way updates are transmitted. The enclosure on each item is a fat page. And because it's a feed, I can follow it in FeedLand, and the blogroll on scripting.com picks it up too. Screen shot. #

In many ways JavaScript is a better language than UserTalk. For example I miss JSON constants. I miss certain language constructs, like conditional assignments. We don't have the idea of a const. On the other hand, JavaScript doesn't have environment features Frontier has. I want to have Atlantis run JavaScript the same way Cancoon (the codename for the kernel of Frontier before this version) ran AppleScript. #

Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.#

The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here. #

My longtime friend Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. Not saying there's no truth to the other stories, but I've yet to hear anything from journalism about how, if left alone, it would develop all areas of human thought. #

It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have. #

On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend Gary Sevitsky from the 70s.#

I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know. #

Claude has started asking me how Claude is doing. It's clear that the Claude I talk to knows nothing about this. I appreciate this, and hope if I said it wasn't working well with me, it would try to fix it? Not sure. Anyway this is what I just wrote, and felt it was worth blogging. "it's working with me the way i want to, and it appears to be learning and getting better at it, though i think that could be my imagination. also just as likely that i'm learning how to work the way it likes to work."#

With Claude Code you don't have to write system scripts to get data about your data. Claude makes that fully transparent. For example, I just asked Claude to get me a list of all the parts I've changed since the last release of frontier.root. So far all the releases have been internal, between Claude and myself. After the job was done, and I had the list in hand, I asked Claude to show me the script it wrote to do the work. It was not written in my coding style which is fine, I wasn't meant to see this. In all the years I've been programming we've never come up with a syntax that was anything close to the simplicity of math. It's easy to describe the algorithm mathematically, but look at all the explaining it had to do it in JS. #