Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.

And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.

People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:

The first question could be:

1. Do you have your birth certificate or passport?

In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.

And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.

They might want to keep things as they are.

I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.

Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.

For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.

I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.

So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.

The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.

Here's a screen shot of the domains folder.

Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc.

This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots.

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.

It's another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.

And how mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer or Soul-Sucker or You-Cuck. Then at least you'd know why you're there. :-)

BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts here where no such limits prevail. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them.

I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This started as a comment in reply to Colin Devroe on Mastodon, but quickly exceeded its 500 character limit. And no doubt I will expand on it over the course of the day.

Here's the issue. AT Proto is proposing to be a better web than the collection of standards that make up the web in 2026, starting with HTTP and HTML and DNS and including Markdown, WebSockets, MP3 and RSS and probably a few others. Maybe they can come up with something better organized and with more consistent interfaces. But the web doesn't work that way. Once it embraces a method of doing something, it goes on, and doesn't reconsider. It's exactly like evolution in the natural world.

Example: RSS was a deeply entrenched competitor when Atom came along, intending to do everything RSS did but do it differently and better. It did get some support and still does to this day, but the differences are flattened out, most feed-reading software doesn't know if the news came from RSS or Atom, the distinction is buried in low-level code.

If you were to look at the size of the developer base for the web, it would be clear how steep a hill AT Proto has to climb, and why? What's in it for Bluesky except satisfaction of ego? Not a good business proposition for a startup.

But they can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That's where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned.

Colin, I don't think they should do it for you and me, they should do it as an investment in their future. Get in the game. The idea of creating something that stands alone is imho very un-web, and not differentiated from their competition. The web was made for small companies like Bluesky. Trying to act like a giant in a way even the biggest giants wouldn't work is not a formula for success. I think Toni and Matt would understand this.

The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.

• There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
• The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
• The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
• The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.

A clip from a video interview with Marc Andreessen has been making the rounds. He was a very successful entrepreneur in the early days of the web and has been a very successful venture capitalist in years following. He's 54 years old. You should watch the clip before reading what it inspired me to say, on Bluesky and below, after a lot of consideration. I kept it about me, and my experience, not coming to any conclusions about him or anyone else.

• I went through a heavy duty midlife crisis when I was in my early 40s. I started seeing a therapist. I was depressed because I had achieved everything I was supposed to, I learned later, but didn't get the love and acceptance I felt I deserved.
• The therapist kept asking about my childhood and my relationship with my parents. I said I really don't want to do this. Why can't I keep going the way I have been going (as pmarca describes). "You can do that, she said -- but you won't have as rich of a life."
• So I gave it a try, and it was the beginning of an education that somehow I had missed. Inside I had come to conclusions that were flat-out wrong. I got to know myself. I stopped thinking others were responsible for things that didn't make me happy. Usually it was me, projecting on them.
• I learned how to get what I want. She was right. I'm still learning 30 years later.

I'm software developer, that's really all I wanted to do -- and blogging and podcasting, ideation and programming. I made the career I wanted, both before and after the therapy sessions that got me started on my trip through myself. I've learned that I am driven by my subconscious, the feeler, even though my concscious self, the thinker, denies there is such a thing.

Whether you accept it or not, you do have feelings and you are driven by them.

One of the great things about going inward is you learn to relate to the subconscious, to form a team -- a parent-child relationship, where the subconscious is the all-powerful child, and the conscious can see things the child is too self-centered, too narcissistic to see. There are other people around, and the things that freak out the child often aren't dangerous. But if they are, the parent is there to help, but that's all it can do. The power is with the child. Lots more to say about this. And btw, yes, I am very woke, relatively speaking -- having lived in Northern California for 30+ years, and have sampled all kinds of workshops and retreats, and visit my hot tub most days, to remember that I don't only exist in my mind, something programmers are particularly subject to -- because we do a lot of thinking, it's a big part of what we do. All the while we still have the body, the child, ready to flee or attack, if danger should come. Or ready to feel glee when what you just did worked the first time. 😄

Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT:

• "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble."

Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.

A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses. I could switch over, but then all the images and included files posted before 2014 or so would break. The minor gain in security on a site that doesn't ask for any private information, is totally not worth throwing out all the work I did on a site that actually has historic importance is just a bad deal. It would be a solving a problem no one but Google has (and it's not even clear what that problem is, and why I should care). There's a principle here too -- letting one company dictate to us how the web works, well I got into the web to get away from that.

Anyway, the reason they still use http in a place where one expects https is apparently is the same reason. It would break things that they don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down. I'm pretty sure it's a bug I unknowingly introduced.

PS: When I'm calling through the API, I get back a record that has a different guid from what's in the feed. Seems like the API and the feed should be in agreement. This is the code that gets the post record. My guess to get them into agreement, I'm going to have to hack this, changing https to http. And there is the reason they can't fix this, and just have to live with this mess. I think overall the people who manage the feed and the API are doing a pretty great job, btw. You have to know I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it.

PPS: I reported the problem once it was fully diagnosed, on the WordPress repo for Calypso.

Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite.

Yesterday, I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb!

An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy.

It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do."