# Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:21:35 GMT ## I want to find all the recent podcast interviews that Jamie Raskin has done. Is there a service that can do that? # Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:45:37 GMT ## It's time for citizens to really unite -

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.

# Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:21:09 GMT ## Frontier's debugger is back -

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.

# Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:39:02 GMT ##

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. # Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:37:41 GMT ## 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. # Mon, 02 Nov 2026 14:23:43 GMT ## What's on my plate -

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.

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.
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.

# Sun, 01 Nov 2026 13:24:05 GMT ##

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. # Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:07:22 GMT ## 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. # Sun, 01 Nov 2026 21:06:13 GMT ## OPML source for October 2026 on Scripting News.