Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because I don’t know." #
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. #
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! #
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. #
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." #
My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)
BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton.
If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers.
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.
