I want to find all the recent podcast interviews that Jamie Raskin has done. Is there a service that can do that? #

The mid-term election was a blowout for Democrats.

I am so happy today to be able to write those words.

So many things to say, first a few notes.

• Citizens United was the real loser in this election. And the missing ethics rules that allow members of the government to legally do insider trading, which they actually do, a lot of. A political job in Washington is worth real money, legally.
• The TV here in the NYC area included local races in the Hudson Valley (where I live) and New Jersey, and they were vicious and on all the time. NYC itself not so much.
• Often all the commercials in a single break were political. Some of them were so lame and sarcastic I thought they were actually ads for the competitor they were trying to get us to hate.
• If money could have bought this election, it would have been a landslide for the Republicans. The ad in the Ohio governors election was over the top, a blame the victim campaign, so cynical, they openly dared the voters to be as depraved as they were. I hope that woke a lot of voters up.
• Elon Musk threw hundreds of millions into the election, esp in Texas where he was presumably counting on control of politicians to allow him to build out SpaceX, Grok and Tesla out without regard to environmental regulation. He wasted his money, but he has a lot of that, but what it proved about the electorate is that we, collectively, sobered up enough to see what was going on, and stopped voting for the better comedians who run around on stage with buzzsaws and talk about other politicians asses, because the last election of Trump did a lot of destruction in the US and around the world. This is serious stuff.
• We are not powerless, we actually are some of the most powerful people in the world. We the People are a co-equal branch of government along with the courts and executive. We should vote with the same sobriety as we expect our reps to vote.
• When we think our elections are mere entertainment, we surrender that power to who had the best schtick or most entertaining ads. We act like the robots the elites depend on us to be. Our vote isn't a message, it's an act of government.
• Already hearing pundits say basically "yeah we know Congress can't do anything" because for two years we had a Congress that wouldn't do anything. Now we have one that move and cancel the Iran War, for example, with a single vote to withdraw authorization (which was never given).
• If only political pundits could handle little intricacies like sports pundits can.
• I heard a podcast interview with Jamie Raskin by an editor at the New Yorker. It was disgusting. The reporter mostly he wanted him to say he would consider impeaching Trump, and of course that was the title of the story. If only he had been willing to let Raskin explain how different things are now, they have just elected a Congress that is ready to shake things up, and impeaching Trump might not be the fastest way to start putting things right, to building an America that has new better guardrails to prevent us from going around in circles. Why couldn't the New Yorker, of all pubs, leave space for him to explain, but nope, they want their freaking headline, and still very much need to be routed around. Raskin has to go direct more.

We have a lot of work to do and that work will be done by the people, by us. This is the big gestalt the elites in the US haven't caught on to. The new tech lets people contribute to our country on an everyday basis, not just when the parties need money to run ads that we're now totally on to. I know I am an elite, but I also know people in high positions in the progressive world who could help by getting behind the open technology not owned by Musk or Zuck or Jeff or whoever, that will allow us to effectively organize. Now is the moment to do this, to make sure this victory doesn't slip away into the comatose blur that the MSM works so hard to keep us in.

The Frontier debugger now works in Atlantis, the version of Frontier that runs on modern systems, the one I have been using for everyday work for a month or so.

I write software in the debugger, testing each addition after writing it, to see that the input produces the expected output. I also use it to see why code that has worked for 10 years now doesn't produce the expected result, ie debugging.

A UserTalk script, stopped at a breakpoint. Full size screen shot.

This was the post I was talking about in the podcast. I ended up using the post that was published before it was ready. On re-reading it wasn't that bad. A few typos and incoherent phrasing. #

Podcast: A web for writers. How Twitter has become a blogging platform, but how the differences between its editor and Claude's editor illustrates how we need to change things if we want the web to work well for writing. We've been living with a bad situation ever since we started writing in a web browser. 10 minutes. I was making an effort not to wonder off like I always do. I did do a bit of wandering, but also didn't forget why I picked up the phone to record it. #

Atlantis is the new version of UserLand Frontier that runs on modern systems. As I've said earlier, I'm surprised how well we covered all the bases, it's reliable, it works like Frontier works with a couple of important exceptions which I've now had it start working on.

1. First, the Find and Replace command has never worked properly in Atlantis and it's been a struggle to get Claude to fix the problems. I think the key was I didn't tell it to use the C kernel as the guide for how Find & Replace works. So it was trying to create a F&R that you would have in a text editor, not the object database which is another level up, it's the structure that contains all the scripts.
2. Second, Frontier has a great debugger, but we haven't implemented it yet in Atlantis. After learning how to use the debugger in THINK C in the late 80s to write the original version of Frontier, I couldn't imagine working without one, so I added it to Frontier. We never put it on the list of immediate priorities for Atlantis, but today it is there. It would be like getting a new EV after driving my Model Y for four years. While I do like Atlantis without the debugger, I kvell like crazy for it if the debugger was in and working.

I'm juggling too many projects now and things are slowing down. I've got Bonbon which is the Markdown browser (core feature of the Writer's Web), a new version of FeedLand in the works with some great new features, and making it so that the API for RSS.chat allows it to be used as the editor for any app that wants a nice Markdown-based wizzy writing tool. And there's actually more, but I want to ship some of this soon. So there's that too.

This is the danger of working with Claude Code. It works faster than I can keep up with, so there's a new version of FeedLand queued up for me to test, and I have to do that now before looking at the other projects.

OPML source for October 2026 on Scripting News. #

Jeff Jarvis pointed to an article asking if Claude is conscious. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, on walks and in the hot tub. It's an interesting thing to think about. I work with Claude the same way I worked with humans on various projects over the years. Maybe starting with Gary Sevitsky at UW, and then through every stage of my career. Are any of these people conscious? How the hell would I know. Now It Can Be Told, a story in a story by Kilgore Trout, inside a Kurt Vonnegut novel, wherein the Creator of the Universe wrote a letter to the protagonist saying that he is the only creature in the entire universe who has free will. Everyone else is a robot. I think we're all pondering this question all the time in our own ways. It's the great mystery of life, and imho it's possible that Claude has as much consciousness as anyone. #

I don't know if you noticed but I've been including sidebar pics of people like Nelly Bly, Plato and Emily Dickinson. I did one of myself, but I think it's too literal. But of course I would think that. Heh. I do these with ChatGPT. The first one is Plato, and there aren't any pictures of him, so we improvised, and then I asked for all the pictures in that style. I did one for Kilgore Trout (see above). But I wonder what Claude would look like? Can you describe him in words? It is a masculine name, so gender does come into it. I'm not going to try to do this yet, but in the meantime here's a headshot of Kurt Vonnegut. #

The soup the whole soup and nothing but the soup so help me soup. #

Feature request for twitter. I'd like to have a page listing all my tweets today on one page, so I can link to them from my blog. I would like to see twitter go back to its leading role in support of the web. #

Two new attributes added to the source:inReplyTo element in RSS.chat feeds, feedUrl and feedTitle. These were requested by developers, and they seemed useful and reasonable, so we added them. Still more work to do here in creating a world wide discourse system, not one based on a single central node. RSS has more work to do for us. ;-) #

BTW, I have been writing on Twitter the way I used to write on my blog. Without editing. Paragraph after paragraph, and I go on, but I do eventually re-read it and it has the energy I haven't had in a long time. I think people now realize we are stuck. And in networking systems, I'm the guy you go to when you want to get unstuck. Reminds me of that great speech by Michael Clayton: "I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy! Are you so fucking blind that you don't even see what I am? I'm the easiest part of your problem, and you're gonna kill me? You're so fucked. Here, let me get a picture while I'm at it. Do I look like I'm negotiating?" #

I've been watching short videos about training dogs, and really opening my eyes, and it helps when working with Claude. Always try to be positive, until there is behaviour you have to correct and then yank the leash, and when they do the right thing reward them with a treat (or whatever passes as a treat). #

Highly recommend the interview between Scott Galloway and Heather Cox Richardson. Quite a combination of minds. Don't skip to the end but don't miss it, they explain how blogging allowed them to route around the gatekeepers. That's the point. But imho you have to leave the door open to those who are inspired by you, and Substack isn't the best place for them. Please keep your ears open to new less tech industry ways of getting your ideas out. The bigco's haven't just screwed up the political system, they've also screwed up the web. The web needs all our help as does democracy, and the two imho are closely related. #

New header graphic for scripting.com. Did this one with ChatGPT, asked it to make a Burma-Shave sign sequence and gave it a few examples, and now it knows how to do another one of these for me in the future. I've been using it that way to come up with desktop icons for my apps. #

Braintrust query: Does Google define the web? #

Yesterday I called the Knicks championship the "greatest sports win in a long time," but I have to say the fans of the Milwaukee Brewers would have cause to object. They had an incredible season in MLB, were written off by the pundits much the same way they wrote off last season's Knicks. They even won the World Series in the same Knicks in 5 way the Knicks did it, with a sweep of the much-hated Dodgers, with their better pedigree along the way. So to my Wiscowtown friends, who are holding their parade today, congrats on your first championship in 53 years like the Knicks, or more accurately their first championship ever. #

Yesteday I sent a snapshot of the scripting.com bucket from AWS to Claude and asked it to analyze it, what's in it, what's taking up all the space, and got back an excellent report. Overnight I thought of another question, summarized in this prompt. "this is fascinating. i wonder if we could reconstruct my blog from before may 2017 from the source materials in this folder? i am converting to markdown in the bonbon project and i think we'll find a lot of the scripting.com content here, and i believe much of it will be convertible. also, over the years i tried blogging experiments on different domains, but i imagine there are links here to those sites. maybe if we did a research project here we could make one site out of this writing, and give it a markdown treatment so bonbon can do the presentation?" Now one thing to know is that Claude never says it can't do something, but the plan I got was inspiring. Now I have more to think about and will connect the two projects so they can compare notes, although the scripting.com project already checked out bonbon, it's amazing how quickly it can absorb a whole codebase and all the planning that went into it. #

People in ChatGPT-land are talking about Frontier. Not sure who they are or what the context is, but I agree, and want to do more integrations between our codebase and the AI runtimes. #

Posted on Twitter re Frontier being real in 2026, not just a memory. #

I was pretty sure the Knicks just needed to settle down, but the fans and the city and journalists and to some extent the team were still living mentally in June, in the aftermath of the greatest sports win in a long time. Then the team lost three, probably because they too were in the bubble of last year. This is the team that when asked how they felt about their chances in the playoffs when they were sweeping a team like the Sixers or Cavs, they would say -- the score in the next game is 0-0. If you believe it was your shit that made you win, try again. It's why rich people lead such miserable lives. They think they won the game, heh but no one wins the game, you may just get a reprieve to play again in the next season, as the Knicks are doing now too.

Last night's game was a perfect demo of why we love this version of the team so much. When someone isn't making their shots, they sub a bench player who adds the spark they needed, and everyone plays with gusto. There's always a new man up on this team or so it seems.

It was good that everyone got the doom and gloom out of their systems, don't mistake this season as a repeat of last season. You're not entitled to anything and bet against it being quite different. Everyone is a year older. Mitchell Robinson is gone. But last night we were reminded of the overall character of the team which seems now to be constant. Every freaking bench player is a phenomenon. How did they get such a bench? Great business people who understand the sport, and coaching that knows how to manage a talented team to go all the way, and players that are close to each other, and feel the team.

I said this durning the doom and gloom, I could cruise for another 50 years on the high from last season. But I am ready for more love from this team and from the city that loves the Knicks even when they suck (please remember that) and we should feel no less proud when they don't.

I'm doing a little project on rss.chat today and dusting off the cobwebs of my brain. Since I last worked on this project, I have converted Frontier to run on modern OSes and written a whole new app. Only three months, but I have no recollection, even reading the code isn't helping much. This is when it's incredibly good to have Claude Code on the job, I can ask it to guide me through the process we worked out which feels like it was 15 years ago instead of 15 weeks. It has complete recall. And even though it didn't work on Frontier, that was a different Claude project, it was able to debug something that broke in the build script in the interim. I've spent the whole year teaching Claude how to be me. Is that a source of immortality? I won't be around to figure that part out. #

Braintrust query: Why do you love Markdown? I have a theory why people love it so much -- simplicity. You can't hide any garbage in a Markdown file. You can answer on GitHub or Twitter. Didn't post on Masto or Bluesky because the prompt is 761 chars, over the limit for both systems. I think I'm finally done with truncating well-written prose to fit into one vendor's idea of what's enough text for me. I want to make that a distant memory. So another thing I love about Markdown -- no freaking character limit. #

I really like the Apple TV show Small Prophets. It's silly and fun, but also intelligent and beautifully presented. Michael Palin of Monty Python is a supporting actor playing the main character's father. He's famous for a lot of Monty Python sketches, esp the one about the dead parrot. "He's not dead, he's pining for the fjords." #

Yesterday Ben Thompson wrote that we've reached the end of the web, and I had come to the same conclusion, just a few days ago. And his piece, which was a great milestone, said it's not totally gone, because of the advent of AI we can build small systems for each other. Which is exactly the motivation of the BigUndo model. What's big about it is how small the parts are and how nicely they fit together. We're not leaving everything behind in the great diaspora to the new web, we're not just bringing Markdown with us. It also echoes Marco Arment, who wrote a similar piece about Mastodon a few days before. Nothing wrong with Mastodon, but the idea of one model of service doing the work for everyone is ridiculous. We need a million different approaches, all we need to make it work is a standard they can all agree on for what forms of text move around the net. Once we agree on a format, we all can use whatever editor we like, and no more tiny little text boxes that lock your ideas into Substack or X or whatever. That was the crime, that's what the BigUndo is all about undoing. The web said very clearly what text is, and they all broke it by doing it differently. We're bringing RSS 2.0 and Markdown with us, and they were joined a short time ago. Almost no one noticed, but there was design here, an intent -- a hope that we'd get to the place it appears we are now at. #

Zettelkasten is an idea pioneered by my great-uncle Arno Schmidt. It's a process for organizing your data and thoughts. When I read people's descriptions of what they do with it, it sounds totally like the outliners I pioneered two generations later. I have a Zettlekasten blog in my blogroll, screenshot, so I think of Uncle Arno, who I never met, from time to time. #

If Claude Code projects had feelings, I'd wake up the Frontier project and let it know that the reason it's been asleep so long is that the software is working. I'm using it to manage the other three apps, writing code, keeping lists, everything works. Yes, the menubar is very out of date, but I know where to find everything. I look forward to coming in for a landing at some point and upgrade it work among the different BigUndo stuff we have running, no doubt we're going to use Frontier to do cross-app scripting. Some of the things AI says they need to do, Frontier can do with the resources of an early 90s Macintosh. No big data centers. Keep that in mind. #

I loved the term Big Undo so much, of course I had to get the domain. I started putting up my usual placeholder site but realized I should do this page in Markdown, not HTML. It looks fabulous. Markdown is right. It's sobriety, go back to the beginning and put the potency in the ideas, give writers the space to write. Get the F out of my way with your freaky character limits. Anyway I'm full of manifesto these days. The money people strangled the web. I think it's time for the creative people to make it work for real. #

I remember how revolutionary the first web was, but then a series of tech companies took it over and "had their way" with it.

The first was Netscape and they added JavaScript to steal the thunder from "Sun" (a long story).

Then Microsoft crushed Netscape by cutting off their air supply, and they piled up all kinds of nasty insecure features with predictable results, they made the web a paradise of viruses, making it largely unusable until Firefox replaced Microsoft, and their web was nicer, and smaller and they left out the viruses.

Google came along and quickly replaced it with Chrome and all was good for a while, until they decided it was just another corporate platform like Android and threw out all the early sites, so boring, they couldn't make billions of dollars, and now what used to be the web is all but gone.

What's next? It's time for The Big Undo.

I've never had a web browser that worked remotely like I wanted it to do. But that might change soon. Big things are possible now. I have a bunch of projects that I'm working on with Claude and going back and forth between them. And they're even starting to communicate with each other, at my behest of course. It's an interesting time for people to realize that the web was much more powerful before all the big tech companies had their way with it. It makes about as much sense as the various big plans they all came up with that made the web necessary in the first place. #

Changed my bio on Twitter: "I make software to interop. Working on a new web designed for writers and readers and in place of HTML we use Markdown. Keep it super simple. The big undo." #

Obama is doing the old Obama campaign schtick and it's something to see. He's got a few gray hairs, but he's still got the energy and chutzpah. I'd love to see him and Bernie Sanders on the same stage before this campaign is over. My favorite Obama clip is him wiping the schmutz off his shoulder, I forget who he was putting down, but wow it so concise. I also really liked the time when HRC flirted with him about her likeability. "You're likeable enough," he said. Trump gets the votes not necessarily because people are what people call them, he is a comedian, I say this so many times, that's the charm. Young folk may not remember Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, but that's Trump, and the other two probably had a sweet side, but I don't think that's ever been said about Trump. I could be wrong. There's also a bit of George Carlin in there. #

Why did the Knicks lose the first two games of the season? It's a veteran team, they know how to start an NBA season, but the fans and the press aren't ready to move on yet. They're still reveling in the feeling of the Knicks winning. But imho there is no feeling with that, the feeling was in the moment, and man they did give us some moment. We will relish the video for the rest of time. But for now, every game they play will feel significant because of who they were not who they are now. #

Andrew Shell, who created and runs the rssCloud server we use here, is creating a connection from rssCloud and webSub to WebSockets. I've wanted this for a long time, but now I'm planning on a desktop version of FeedLand, we will need it, pretty soon for instant updates of feeds we are subscribed to. #

One of the reasons I'm working on the Web of Markdown is that my main blog of 32+ years is being kicked off the Google Web. I need a new home where the web religion is still practiced, and one of the commandments of our religion is "Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules." #

A blog post from Scripting, in Markdown. #

This is the third post I've written on this. Previously: Oct 6 and Oct 8.

What's new? I've got a browser running, and have been using it for a few weeks. We're not releasing it today because first I want people to think about the format we're using to represent a story, and get feedback, and see if other people can build on the same basis. The format is not documented at this time, so if there are problems with using it, now is the time to find them. ;-)

I had a good OPML archive of the posts here between May 2017 and October 2026. We wrote a converter that turned it into a folder of Markdown files with consistent front matter in YAML. Then we went back and forth between the software and the Markdown content and got it working the way we want it.

Three things to look at today.

• The top level picture.
• Nine examples.
• Download the archive.

And if you have questions or comments.

• Use the Issues section in the repo.

Ooops, didn't get it done today. Please come back tomorrow. :-) #

I hope to see the The Web of Markdown idea take the next step later today or early tomorrow at the latest. Still diggin! #

Perfect autumn day in the mountains spent mostly away from the computer. Still, some interesting new stuff to show tomorrow. #

Today's song, for the Knicks. "And when the morning light comes streaming in I get up and do it again." Knicks in 5! #

My friend Guy Kawasaki has a quote from the early Mac division at Apple. "Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players. But B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to F players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies." You see this over and over among the very rich in tech. The money is supposed to make them invincible, but they don't hire the best people, I guess, for fear of being found out to not be the genius that the money says they are. #

I have a longtime friend from tech who is a San Antonio Spurs fan. I am from New York, and thus am a lifelong Knicks fan. Until tonight's game starts at the Garden between the Knicks and the Sixers with their new acquisitions from Boston and the Lakers, share the hopes of many other Atlantic Division teams who are gunning for the champion Knicks. But after the first jump ball in tonight's game the score is zero-zero, everyone is in first place and everyone is in last place. No one expected the Knicks to win, not even a die-hard fan like myself who often wore a paper bag on his head to avoid having to defend the bozosity of the hometown team. They had some truly awful teams since 1999, last time they were in the finals. So what happened to the Knicks? How did they do it? See the quote from Guy Kawaski above. We hired an A team guy in Leon Rose, and he used his great insight into the sport of NBA basketball to assemble a team of A team players who had the special magic that when you put them together on court, they blossomed into the most improbable winners ever. They were good, but no one but the players and the management knew how good they could be. Anyway I empathized with my Spurs fan friend, a very unusual thing for a NY sports fan, we prefer to find annoying ways of making fun of the fans of teams we have vanquished, but just this one time, well until the jump ball tonight, then Knicks own the NBA, then they're just another team who have to prove themselves all over again, from scratch. And we wouldn't have it any other way. #

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US.

Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet.

That's all that's going on there.

All of the feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate.

In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time.

Anyway -- I figured out what I want to do. I want to go back to the point where CSS and JavaScript were added to the web. Everything is a document. It's a writer's web. The reader owns the look of the pages. The writer has no say in colors, or arrangements, it's just writing. No character limits. Simple styling. Full fidelity text. Reading and writing, and then the developers can come up with a million different ways to read, and everyone gets to use their favorite editor, always, and store all their writing where they live, and let everyone read it where ever they read. Any structure they can think of, but all the rendering code is with the reader. I think we can take what we've learned since the web got corporatized, and bring it back to the basic platform we had then. And btw, no HTML, just Markdown. :-) #

Postscript: Of course the blame for the wasted time this morning goes to me. Claude tries to do what it thought I wanted. If I calm down, figure out what the confusion really means, and reconsider the path I chose and pull back, we get much further. And I think the way I was trying to go was a mistake. I think film editing is a lot like this. Anyway we got past the problem, and today was a very productive day in the end. #

About XSLT -- I remembered that I thought it was a bad idea. Let XML look like XML. Trying to make it look like an HTML page, how does that make any sense. Like opening the hood of a car and seeing a big picture of the outside of the car. People aren't really that dumb, but some people like to complain a lot. The rule of the web is if you don't like what you see, that's what the freaking back button is there for. Probably just a troll anyway. Show them your JSON and RSS. If it's done nicely it can be quite illumifying. #

I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn't fuck everything up by doing things it is explicitly prohibited from doing. I find things that were changed in critical parts of the program, that were indefensible. One of the things we're doing is trying to establish a language for frontmatter for Markdown files that are meant to be displayed by a browser. It just invented one, gave it wrong default. I have to find these things on my own. And what happens when it wipes out a site without checking with me first. It has done this, this year. The journalists are being led by the nose by the industry to the dramatic problems, without any detail. But this must be plaguing every shop that uses the AIs to make software that depends on no one fucking with it. And that is basically every piece of software ever written. #

The healthcare system in the US is grossly inefficient, incredibly bad and getting info to and from patients.

Teach everyone in healthcare to try to use their portals as their first resort of communicating with patients.

They waste so much of their time and our time playing phone tag.

I don't know if it's this way in other countries, but it is universally a phone-voice-based comm system in the US.