http://scripting.com/2026/03/09.html#a143346 http://scripting.com/2026/03/09.html#a143346
An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor.
AIs can reason http://scripting.com/2026/03/09/140858.html?title=aisCanReason

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a163034 http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a163034
Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes, do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about enshittification and that's right -- but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up. Still diggin!
http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a161109 http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a161109
Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a161532 http://scripting.com/2026/03/08.html#a161532
Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference."
He was a trust buster http://scripting.com/2026/03/08/162943.html?title=heWasATrustBuster

If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.

http://scripting.com/2026/03/07.html#a165126 http://scripting.com/2026/03/07.html#a165126
Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/07.html#a141927 http://scripting.com/2026/03/07.html#a141927
I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too.
Cory, RSS has never been dormant http://scripting.com/2026/03/07/204625.html?title=coryRssHasNeverBeenDormant

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom.

  • Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone.
  • Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that.

Happened to the Mac too

  • In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac.

A blogroll for 2026

  • BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.
  • It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory.
  • You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site.

My old ass

  • I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory.
  • I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a215120 http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a215120
Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?
http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a200529 http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a200529
Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a215916 http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a215916
I remember liking the first three seasons of Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a195948 http://scripting.com/2026/03/06.html#a195948
If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/05.html#a230540 http://scripting.com/2026/03/05.html#a230540
On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a141625 http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a141625
The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a035810 http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a035810
What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a210559 http://scripting.com/2026/03/04.html#a210559
We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a145455 http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a145455
I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a183327 http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a183327
Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these mind bombs for me.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a185759 http://scripting.com/2026/03/03.html#a185759
I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file. Like this.
Really Simple pizza http://scripting.com/2026/03/03/192257.html?title=reallySimplePizza

"It really tastes like a pizza!!"

http://scripting.com/2026/03/02.html#a150313 http://scripting.com/2026/03/02.html#a150313
Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)
I tuned into the Fediforum http://scripting.com/2026/03/02/161100.html?title=iTunedIntoTheFediforum

I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

Some of my takeaways from the meetup.

  • Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be.
  • What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.
  • Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed.
  • Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄
  • More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new.
  • I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects.
  • One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress.
  • I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a173357 http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a173357
If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.
http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a153530 http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a153530
A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.
opmlProjectEditor format http://scripting.com/2026/03/01/143312.html?title=opmlprojecteditorFormat

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.

http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a141159 http://scripting.com/2026/03/01.html#a141159
Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.